So far, the international economic consequences of the war in the Caucasus have been fairly minor, despite Georgia’s role as a major corridor for oil shipments. But as I was reading the latest bad news, I found myself wondering whether this war is an omen — a sign that the second great age of globalization may share the fate of the first.Oh noes, it's the end of globalization! Great-grandpa summered on the Crimean, and all I got was this stupid pipeline. Um.
If you’re wondering what I’m talking about, here’s what you need to know: our grandfathers lived in a world of largely self-sufficient, inward-looking national economies — but our great-great grandfathers lived, as we do, in a world of large-scale international trade and investment, a world destroyed by nationalism.
-The Krugster
In the Krugster's authorial voice, I detect a mixture of preemptive eulogizing and told-ya-so schadenfreude. The Krug believes in some kind of managerial materialism, and he believes, as he says explicitly at the end of the column, that the precondition for a lasting global order is for big governments to act "sensibly." No shit. The Krug's history leaves a little something to be desired. Was fin-de-siècle-through-Great-War really the first age of "large-scale international trade and investment"? How about the great Mercantile era in the 18th Century? How about the Silk Road?
Meanwhile, the English gentleman in the Krug's Keynseian anecdote could indeed pick up the phone and order anything in the goddamn world while sipping his Earl Grey. This may have had something to do with being in the inheritor class of a nation that held one quarter of the planet's land surface in imperial bondage. The "first era of globalization" was the high point of European colonialism, and what is in fact meant by Keynes' observation that a European could "adventure his wealth in the natural resources and new enterprises of any quarter of the world" is that Europe could extract natural resources and cheap labor from its colonial possessions. Well, maybe things haven't changed so much.
The Krug goes on to fret:
[If] Russia is willing and able to use force to assert control over its self-declared sphere of influence, won’t others do the same? Just think about the global economic disruption that would follow if China — which is about to surpass the United States as the world’s largest manufacturing nation — were to forcibly assert its claim to Taiwan.And here, between the lines, we see the neoliberal understanding of this "globalization" argot they're so fond of tossing around the playground: America ascendent, Europe complaint, Russia reduced, and China cheap. You really can't beat that "self-declared" dig for sheer Americo-exceptionalist audacity, as if our "sphere of influence" (i.e. everywhere) arose out of the primeval imagination of the creator god back when he was parting the waters and scattering the sky with stars.
15 comments:
I can't decide who is more irritating---Paul Krugman or Michael Phelps.
I know it wasn't what you were saying, but your last sentence, with your primeval imagination and creator gods parting the water evoked, to me, a more sinister image.
The fact is that power doesn't stay concentrated for long, and the colonized tend to bounce back after a while. We thought they'd stay young and vulnerable forever, but now the Russians have risen again. And the Chinese and Indians are more threatening still.
A multipolar world, more violent, tending toward equilibrium, but of an imperial sort, will emerge again, and I imagine that certain New York Times columnists, so used to comforting prognostications and explanations, will be reduced to gibbering heaps, like the protagonists of a Lovecraft story. Or maybe I'm the only one who sees it that way.
The difference is that the English did a pretty damn good job of running their colonies. I'm extremely grateful I live in America, one of their colonies that managed to retain the elites they planted here, though our war of independence remains a mistake. Today the international poverty aid bureaucracy employs more people than colonialism ever did and with much worse results despite their avowedly altruistic intentions.
Ya gotta admit, though, that listening to 'Merican jernalists attempt to pronounce all those foreign sounding names (after years of growing fat, stupid & lazy feasting on names like 'Bush' and 'Rice') is good fun.
Krugster is more annoying, by a whisker.
And, one more thing, no way Phelps beat that other dewd in the Butterfly; the one who chose to kick his way into the finish.
The fix was in!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Mike
um.
Yep, the British Empire was so much more efficient at ensuring famines killed as many people as possible, murdering restive natives, etc. etc. etc.
(the dig about the Poverty Industry, though, is oh so true!)
Hey brian, have you been paying any attention to what happened after decolonialization? Heaps of poverty and massacres! It was the British who turned Rhodesia into the breadbasket of Africa and Mugabe who turned it into the fastest-shrinking economy in the world. All those inhabitants of Rwanda and Darfur sure were lucky to be massacred by Africans rather than Europeans, yessirree. And which portions of Africa are the worst off today? Generally the least heavily colonized. Perhaps Africa is just unique and I shouldn't focus on that so much. How about the national heroes of asia who liberated their lands from colonialism? Among them you find some of the most notorious mass-murderers of all. India was fortunate enough never to be run by a psychotic (unlike China or Cambodia), but shortly after independence the Hindus and Muslims started massacring each other, then a little later West Pakistan set about raping and murdering as many East Pakistanis (now Bengalis) as they could before the Indian military stopped them. Colonialist militaries can be pretty brutal as well. Who can forget the lengths the French went to in Algeria? After they left, things didn't get better though. As the War Nerd put it Algeria: The Psychos Will Inherit the Earth. There's a former French colony much closer to our backyard, Haiti. It probably felt mighty good putting all those French heads on pikes back in the day, but now they're eating cakes made of dirt.
I'm not going to go as far as Mencius Moldbug and endorse a return to colonialism. First off, I don't think it can be done. You build an empire with the empire building materials you have, and what we've got has made things worse than under Saddam (who was in turn worse than Lord Cromer). Second of all, screw 'em. I don't care about saving the world, feeding the poor or whatnot. But I'm not going to bullshit about the awful British just because our country defines itself by it's war of independence and is also full of resentful Irishmen (and wasn't the post-independence civil war in the Republic a lot of fun?) like my dad was as an I.R.A sympathizing young man. Speaking of Irish independence, check out this for an example of the glaring Grade-A bullshit the Great and Good have spouted. It only goes downhill when we get to the Frantz Fanton and Che Guevara post-colonialists that positively celebrate murder.
Mr. TGGP, i don't know what you've read, but the reason there was a West, East or any Pakistan whatsoever was because of the goddamn British. They couldn't stand to lose the crown jewel of their goddamn colonialism, so they broke it up by deliberately empowering the rather small section of people who REALLY wanted a separate country for muslims as well as the (smaller still) section that REALLY wanted a Hindu India. These were the people behind the quasi-fascist Hindu parties we have today. they heightened the violence even as the non-violent majority of the indian peace movement was making great strides, eventually forcing Gandhi's hand into accepting independence at such a great cost.
Krugster is more annoying, by a whisker.
And, one more thing, no way Phelps beat that other dewd in the Butterfly; the one who chose to kick his way into the finish.
The fix was in!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Mike
Absolutement. That's one of the resaons he's so fucking annoying---he's an enabled cheater.
You know his legs are only 17 inches long and NBC keeps informing us of that as if it's a good thing.
How long are Krugman's legs?
The Krugster is so special---a perfect example of an exceptional country.
America ascendent, Europe complaint, Russia reduced, and China cheap
I know you were dying for one last piece of alliteration here to pull off the hat trick. Might I suggest "Europe enervated"? "Europe eager [to please]"?
Like India was unified before the British got there. It was a bunch of warring statelets. And it isn't a doctrine of the Church of England that a believer is to throw dirt into the mouths of Hindus and make them swallow it, that's from the jolly followers of Muhammad (piss be upon him). With people rearing to chop each other up like they were, fat chance of Gandhi's powers of passivity to hold things together. It was the British boot that clamped down on the communal violence and their absence that precipitated it.
tggp, your understanding of the British role in post-colonial politics in both Africa and Asia is, shall we say, somewhat simplistic. (And we haven't even mentioned the Middle East).
Like India was unified before the British got there. It was a bunch of warring statelets.
Well, what warfare there was was mostly low-level, small in scale, and intermittent. And there was the Moghul Empire, which you seem to have completely forgotten about... The conflict since is largely a product of British post-colonial policy - we deliberately set the situation up to generate as much conflict as humanly possible. (Much like we did in Palestine.) Prior to our involvement, the Muslims and Hindus lived side-by-side - not quite in perfect peace and harmony, true enough, but not exactly poised on the brink of major warfare either.
You also completely overlook the minor fact that while the events in Darfur and Rwanda were / are appalling, they're chicken feed compared to what we Brits did in India. Hell, we starved more Irish than there were victims of both of those conflicts put together, and we had a much smaller population to work with (the Great Irish Famine resulted in the loss of fully 20% of the population). In India, somewhere around 40 million people died in famines either caused by or severely exacerbated by British colonial policy.
And that's India, where we regarded the natives as sufficiently human to bother to notice their deaths. In those parts of the world that we regarded as distinctly sub-human, there's really no telling how many we killed.
Not to forget that French (and American) policies helped create the horrors in Rwanda and Burundi.
tggp loves British colonialism? Dude, he should totally go to South Africa! They'd love to hear about how British decency taught the swarthy Hindoo the Christian principles of peace.
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