Boles => Grimes on China

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Fri, 13 Apr 2001 15:51:20 -0500
From: "Boles (office)" <facbolese@usao.edu>
Subject: RE: Fact Sheet on US-China "Trade Relationship"


Interesting.  But for one, I wouldn't underestimate Japan's military
industrial complex.  It is, after all, one of the largest in the world,
within the top five, depending on which estimate one reads.  It would
follow, if one believes that the cycle is repeating as it has in the past,
that Japan right now, in the midst of its economic malaise and with its
ultra-conservative and unapologetic leaders still in place, ought to pursue
military keynesianism and strike against China again.  Most Japanese may not
stomach militarism, yet alone war, despite the lingering recession.
However, I think there are other more compelling reasons why this not
happening.

I think the world situation is entirely different from prior cycles.  The
system seems to have been in transition since 1945, I think, in part because
the US disolved a structure/process of the system that was integral to its
geographic expansion and the causes of prior world wars and hegemonies --
territorialism.  Territorialism was eliminated by, in Wallerstein words, the
political incorporatioin of the periphery (i.e. decolonial sovereignty).
That, along with the creation of UN insitutions of core governance, made all
areas safe for all core capital, as Arrighi points out.   Capital doesn't
need "its" core state's protection when it has the protection of all states
(most of the time anyhow) and so has become more international and
interlocked than ever.  Prior to 1945, the firms of Japan and Germany had to
play the territorial game to gain access to resources for industrialization,
and that meant war.  Depression didn't help of course, just as it isn't
helping Japan today.   But after 1945, all states got access to all areas,
with of course, the exception of the Soviet Bloc, which gave some states,
the Soviet Union above all, access to the resources of certain areas for
industrialization.  And that of course helped legitimize the policies of US
hegemony.

But since the US created a free-enterprise system, which has become truly
global since 1989, there is no reason for states to engage in world war over
resources or markets, for they already have access and are gaining more
access all the time.  We may be more likely to see wars between the core and
semi-peripheral states that are secular but have gone "rogue" (e.g. Iraqi,
Panama), or which have given up on development and see the US as evil
incarnate (Iran).
China is a player, not a fighter.  Of course, Chinese leaders, it seems to
me, want their due say in the area.  They expect that their political power
and prestige should grow in tandum with their economic power, both
regionally and within the international institutions of power, like the UN,
WTO, etc.

It is the US which is increasingly not "playing the rules by the game" and
which may provoke instability in East Asia, as the US has elsewhere, in
order to drive capital to the safe shores of the US, as has happened during
the 1980s and 1990s resulting in the greatest capital inflow and stock
market boom ever.  That seems a possibility that could be affected by the
domestic politics of US decline.  For as many have pointed out, in this era
of hegemonic decline, there is no rising continental nation-state with
military power comparable to the declining hegemon, whose military power has
in fact increased.  What's to stop the US from using it?  International
capital, among others, for the time being.  But will that always be the
case?