The Endgame of Globalization

Neil Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781135930523
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política pública

The recent American invasion of Iraq represents the endgame of America's decades-old effort to impose its vision of globalization-a system dominated by multinational firms and buttressed by the liberalism of John Locke and Adam Smith. Whereas the war surely ended Saddam Hussein's regime, the storm of countervailing forces it unleashed points to another end: that of America's latest global project. This is not the first time that the US has tried to reshape the world in its own liberal image, but the third. The first effort stretched from the late nineteenth century to 1920, ending when America rejected entry into the League of Nations. The FDR administration engineered the second attempt in the 1940s, but it withered in the Cold War. The third moment-the era of globalization-began in the late 1960s, when the US transformed the Bretton Woods financial institutions and used its own economic power to enforce a worldwide neoliberal orthodoxy tied to an ideal of liberal democracy. But the effort is failing for the same reasons the preceding attempts failed. As Neil Smith shows, the Lockean liberalism that animates American globalism has always been undercut by a crippling nationalism that exposes the contradictions built into the ideal. In each instance, a hard-edged nationalism-evident in the rejection of the League of Nations, in the policies of the Cold War, and in the current Iraq war-always surfaces and drives US actions despite America's self-perception as a champion of benign universal values. Moreover, it always generates opposition. Attuned to history, political economy, and geography, The Endgame of Globalization is a sweeping and powerful account of America's century-long quest for global dominance and the nationalism within that invariably unravels the dream.

1
ENDGAME GEOGRAPHIES

“World domination, the same old story. The world is full of people who think they are Napoleon or God.”

Sean Connery as James Bond, Dr. No, 1962

Baghdad, April 9, 2003. With the cameras of the global media excitedly in place, the toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein begins. Several dozen jubilant Iraqi men throng around the base while a US marine scales the statue and drapes Saddam’s head with a large Stars and Stripes. It remains there for a few minutes while a jib and chain from a US half-track tank are attached to Hussein’s neck. Another climber replaces the red, white, and blue with an Iraqi flag. The statue is soon pulled over, bending to the plaza floor amid cheers all around. Beamed across the world, this image quickly became iconic of the end of Iraq’s dictatorship and the imminent victory of the massive US-led invasion force. Endgame Saddam.

If the orchestration of this photo-op by US marines was readily apparent, the contradictions it expressed may have been less so. Washington always forcefully insisted that this was a war and invasion carried out by an international coalition, not simply the United States, and yet for US marines in Baghdad their own national symbol was an appropriate—even natural—symbol of victory for global good. The nascent contradiction between narrow nationalist interests on the one hand and the claim to embody global right on the other was neither accidental nor arbitrary, but tapped deep and long-held aspirations for an American globalism. If the exuberance of the moment swept away all such public recognition, US marine colonels on the eve of war were much more astute. Anticipating the revelatory power of just such a scenario, they had quietly but firmly frowned on nationalist ostentation, ordering the flag kept under wraps. Its appearance on Saddam’s head was in any event widely understood around the world as a more triumphalist kind of endgame, an increasingly accomplished US political and economic hegemony in the world: endgame global America.

The substitution of the Iraqi for the American flag on Saddam’s head opened the prospect of an alternative, however. It was initially met with a certain patronizing jollity—“isn’t that nice for the poor Iraqis who now have their country back”—but in retrospect, as war and invasion turned into quagmire and continuous civil strife, this scene may yet prove to have a more prophetic meaning. Rather than buttressing America’s enthronement as political, economic, and military hegemon, opposition to the war and subsequent occupation of Iraq may well provoke a different result: “endgame lost.”¹

Iraq 1920/2005

Prior to 1920, Iraq did not exist. It was created that year as a British mandate after a bitter contest over the area’s future, and ultimately became an independent nation-state in 1932. Three quarters of a century later, it lost that sovereignty after a US-led invasion, and today it sits as the epicenter around which future US global power will be arbitrated.

Consolidated in the wake of World War I from three provinces in the crumbling Ottoman Empire—Basra, Baghdad and Mosul—the new state was administered under League of Nations mandate. The British administration was predictably dismissive of local ambitions and demands, and in early 1920 opposition grew, especially among the southern Shi’a who had been suppressed by the Ottomans in favor of the northern Sunnis. The British were bent on repeating the Ottoman divide-and-conquer strategy, but they were challenged by a Shi’a-led coalition seeking Iraqi independence. After a series of demonstrations and violent revolts against British occupation, a full-scale armed uprising broke out in June 1920. The Kurds piled on, rising against a resurgent Turkish military that threatened a reprise of Ottoman control in Kurdish towns and terrain. The jerry-rigged nation-state, it was clear, would be difficult to manage, and the British military responded forcefully. Over several months, they suppressed the Iraqi revolt at the cost of an estimated 6,000 Iraqi lives and approximately 500 Indian and British troops.

The similarities with 2005 are significant except that the more recent invasion is American-led rather than British, is more deadly, and is more prolonged—but probably just as futile. More than 1,000 US troops have been killed in less than eighteen months, and the number of Iraqi fatalities quickly doubled the 1920 toll as civil strife spiraled out of control. An interim government has been widely recognized as a puppet for US power. Even with 135,000–150,000 troops on the ground, the US has been unable to pacify the country—indeed it was forced to retreat from several large cities—and faces a growing crisis. Like the British after 1920, the US wants control of Iraq at arm’s length. Ideally, they would like to extract themselves, but like the British again they hardly know how to accomplish this as the mess of occupation magnifies.

The historical geography of the 1920 uprising is instructive. From bases in India, Britain had invaded the southern city of Basra in late 1914 after the Ottoman Empire joined Germany and the other “Central Powers” at the advent of World War I. Their “military expedition” sought to break almost four centuries of Ottoman power over the region—an Asian continuation of long-term European efforts against Muslim powers. After serious military setbacks, the British eventually took Baghdad in March 1917 and Mosul a year later. Meanwhile, the evanescent 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement between the colonial powers of Britain and France envisaged a division of the Ottoman Middle East: the French would take much of present-day Syria, while the British claimed prerogative over a possibly independent Palestine and control of the Transjordan, as it was then known, together with the three provinces that eventually became Iraq (including latter-day Kuwait). While giving lip-service to the possibility of independence, the British moved to control these new territories from Delhi as much as from London. The new regional borders were still amorphous, and the British refused to allow an official Iraqi delegation to be represented at the all-important Paris Peace Conference in 1919.

United under British rule, leaders in the three provinces cautiously forged closer political ties among the Shi’a of the south, the favored Sunnis based largely in and around Baghdad and the north, and the Kurds from Mosul and the Turkish borderlands in the northeast. Then as now, the majority Shi’a anticipated taking control and assumed the elite Sunni, who had enjoyed greater influence under the Ottoman state, would be sidelined. But that did not happen. Shi’a tribal leaders, who enjoyed longstanding local loyalty based on relations of land ownership, water rights, the authority to tax, and religious fealty, were themselves marginalized.

A March 1921 conference in Cairo was organized and controlled by that billy-goat-gruff of the British Empire, then colonial secretary Winston Churchill, and attended by numerous Arab officials from the region. It mandated that a separate territory of Iraq would become a kingdom and that Faisal, the Hashemite Amir, would be placed on the throne. Faisal had little immediate connection to the three provinces—his father had been the sharif of distant Mecca in present-day Saudi Arabia—but he was recommended due to his leadership of the so-called “Arab Revolt” that sided with the invading British in the war against the traditional Ottoman occupier. A significant if sometimes reluctant British ally, Faisal was more than a puppet but hardly more than “sovereign of a state that itself was not sovereign.”²

Iraqis were broadly opposed to the British mandate, not just in the center but at the edges. In 1922 the Turkish military, vanquished in the war, moved back into the Kurdish area of Mosul. There, the the British overseeing the territory let the Turks discipline the Kurds before responding with Royal Air Force indignation. The British not only routed the Turks, but in 1924 forced the local Kurdish leader into Persian exile. Hopes for an autonomous Kurdistan waned as the British and Turks effectively split the Kurds between Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria. Various treaties throughout the 1920s established Iraq’s geographical boundaries vis-à-vis its six neighbors, producing the tell-tale straight lines of imperial imposition on the region’s map.

Their imperialism facing exhaustion, the British slowly realized in the 1920s that they could not control the new Iraq. The old strategy of territorial control was bankrupt, but control at arm’s length was a different matter, and a series of assemblies and parliaments beholden to London was organized. While they pushed for Iraqi entry into the League of Nations—a stamp of global legitimacy—the British also worked their economic interests. German and Ottoman shares in the Turkish Petroleum Company, which had located large oil reserves, were already liquidated, and the British grabbed and reorganized corporate ownership of Iraqi oil in favor of British capital (47.5 percent shared equally between Royal Dutch Shell and the Anglo-Persian Oil Company [later British Petroleum—BP]). The French, in compensation for their acquiescence over Jordan and Palestine, received 23.75 percent and the Americans another 23.75 percent (shared equally between Standard Oil of New Jersey and Mobil). Despite a 1920 promise, the British thereby froze the Iraqis out of any real control—5 percent was left—over their own oil, in lieu of royalty payments. Oil was tapped in Kirkuk in 1927, and a pipeline to the Mediterranean was completed eight years later. With the oil agreement in place, a 1930 Anglo-Iraqi treaty announced the end of the British mandate and Iraqi independence.

While getting some of what they wanted, the British realized the need to get out of an Iraq that they sensed would be impervious to external control. And they were eventually successful in retaining significant economic control of new, vast and growing oil resources without the headaches of political and territorial control. There was of course much intervening history, but essentially the same dilemma faced the United States after 2003. Again, many Iraqis have not been entirely antagonistic to a foreign-sponsored intervention, this time aimed at overthrowing a widely despised dictator. And again the crucial question becomes how to amalgamate disparate political, geographical and religious groups into some kind of national unity, or else how to organize an alternative.

Much like the British in 1920, the United States today struggles to establish territorial control and promote a favorable local regime that will support US economic prerogatives. The Bush administration—at least its dominant Defense wing—evidently believed that the military overthrow of Hussein would be the hard part and that flowers and kisses for invading troops would grease the wheels of an effortless reconstruction of comprador power. The comparisons with 1920 are again instructive. The US administration has been astonishingly naive in believing that the Iraqi population would cede national control to an invading power that breathes the flames of imperial ambition—a self-described “crusade”—in the Middle East. As one historian wrote of the British in 1920: “Once in, it was difficult to get out.”³

‘We Are All Americans Now’

The powering of commercial planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in 2001 were highly local events yet at the same time utterly global. They certainly elicited a global response. Sympathy for the immediate victims—more than 2,700 New Yorkers hailing from some 90 countries, 180 military personnel and employees in Washington DC, and 40 people on a downed plane in Pennsylvania—came from everywhere as the gruesome results of the attacks played out in real time on television and computer screens around the world. From Seoul to Cairo, Moscow to Santiago, and throughout the Middle East, there were candlelight vigils and other sympathetic demonstrations deploring the attacks on New York and Washington. Horror mixed with widespread apprehension over the embarrassing ease of the attacks. That they seemed to come from nowhere raised the specter of a sudden escalation of terrorist threats from which no one was safe. Especially for those who had traveled to New York—less so the antiseptic space around the Pentagon—the depth of global empathy with the United States was extraordinary. German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, reciprocating the cross-border Cold War comradery of John F. Kennedy four decades earlier (“Ich bin ein Berliner”), expressed the new sense of global vulnerability and affinity in the same terms: “we are all Americans now.” “We are all Americans,” insisted the September 12, 2001 banner headline in the French newspaper, Le Monde.

In some strange way we were all Americans after September 11, 2001. But how and why? Certainly not because September 11th was in any way the most deadly act of terrorism we have known or because it claimed an inordinate number of lives in the annals of human violence: after the ethnic cleansing of Bosnia and Kosovo in the early 1990s we were not all suddenly oppressed Muslims; after the Central African genocide of the mid-1990s— at the expense of perhaps 700,000 lives—the citizens of the world did not all become Tutsis; nor did we become Timorese nor Palestinians nor Guatemalan peasants. After the horrific bombing of trains in Madrid in 2004, we did not all become Spaniards, nor Russians after Beslan. A certain racism—perhaps more accurately a sense of some differential value of citizens from different groups, countries, or hemispheres—surely framed some of the differential response to September 11th, and the global power of US-owned and controlled media, for whose executives these events were obviously highly personal, accentuated the response. Certainly too the spectacular nature of the attacks—the targets, execution, symbolism, and instantaneous worldwide transmission of the falling towers—seared them into our global imagination. After all, the United States stood as the world’s remaining superpower, apparently inviolate, assuredly powerful, yet suddenly and somehow an underdog in a fight few perceived it was even in. But this remains only a partial account. Just as powerful is the close connection that many people feel around the world to the expression of “America”—quite distinct from the US government—as a place where they might also experience a different kind of life, temporarily or permanently, in practice or vicariously. This ideology is as old as it is powerful in the modern world and it was very easily called up, both deliberately and spontaneously, by the events of 2001 and by responses to them. The wound of September 11th was also a wound to this psychic comfort afforded across national and cultural borders. It spoke to us all just as the Stars and Stripes over Saddam’s head was meant to do nineteen months later.

To say this is not to succumb to right-wing and nationalist ideologies about American greatness—love it or leave it—nor does it confuse the power of the myth for the less salubrious reality of millions of people’s daily lives inside and outside the United States. The mythology of America sits uncomfortably with the reality of 36 million people, disproportionately minorities, living in poverty within its own boundaries. But it does suggest the importance of such deep-seated global desires attached to this specific, territorially circumscribed, national space—and its idea. It therefore also helps us to gain a perspective on the astonishing fact that the reception of the United States on the global stage was virtually reversed only a few months after 2001. People around the world protested the US administration’s blundering war against Afghanistan, the bloody war and failed occupation in Iraq, the refusal of the US administration to heed the wishes and procedures of the United Nations—indeed the deliberate humiliation of that body—and Washington’s unilateralism in the economic, political, social, and environmental spheres. If there is a rogue state on the loose, a broad global consensus seemed to conclude, it is America’s Bush administration. Even in Britain, the main ally of the United States in this period, a majority of people saw the United States as a greater threat to global peace than Al Qaeda.

In an extraordinary reversal of global public opinion, “We are all Americans” morphed quickly into an outright global opposition to the Bush administration’s arrogant unilateralism. Virtually in unison, reporters and politicians chose to interpret such rising criticism of the administration and its war policies as anti-Americanism. “Aren’t we the good guys, the world’s saviors?” was the implied tone of faux innocence. A popular howl was raised against the Germans, Russians and especially the French, and at the nadir of this petulant, reactionary nationalism, French wine was poured down many an American sink while french fries became “freedom fries” in US Congress cafeterias.

That some deep-seated anti-Americanism did and does exist should not blind us to the convenient slippage by media and government confusing American government policy on the one side and America the people and the place on the other. Most people around the world are far more astute in making that distinction, and repugnance at the US war in Iraq is not the same as anti-Americanism. (The popular French response to freedom fries was whimsical, uncomprehending curiosity.) The cry of anti- Americanism in fact deflects global responsibility, provides a self-justifying refusal to comprehend US imperial complicity. This is the flip side of the deep personal identification many feel with “America” but manifestly not with the American state. The US behaving badly poses a visceral challenge to that affinity, and as with Vietnam, people around the world—much like many Americans themselves—feel that a warmongering US administration has betrayed them, taken “their” America from them.

There was nothing inevitable about the squandering of global magnanimity toward the US after 2001. But it was not unpredictable either, and its causes go much deeper than simply the reactionary pugilism of the Bush administration. A deep continuity connects US global ambition from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century, and it has helped to mold the long-term economic and cultural as much as political policy of successive US administrations, Republican and Democratic alike. As I hope to show in this book, the wars since 2001—in Palestine/Israel as much as Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as older smoldering conflicts from Colombia to Indonesia—should be seen less as moral crusades against terrorism, and more as an expression of what I called at the beginning “endgame global America,” the culmination of a US-centered (but not exclusively American) political and economic globalization. They represent the political face of globalization, leading to nothing less than a US-centered global hegemony.

Put geographically, there is a trenchant contradiction between on the one hand the global promise of a certain kind of Americanism, to which people around the world can readily relate and invest in—the promise, and for no small few, the reality of a comfortable life—and on the other hand the exclusionary, elite and nationalist self-interest espoused as an integral part of this Americanism. The latter represents a raft of global and simultaneously local practices that are experienced by millions around the world (including many millions in the US itself) as repressive, exploitative, vindictive, even life-threatening. US military repression, support for despotic regimes, unemployment, and the poverty wages as well as dangerous work conditions experienced in many US multinational firms and their subsidiaries and contractors are d...