Geopolitics and geoculture of newly marginal areas

<fontfamily><param>Times</param>Dear colleagues,


The recent events and exchanges around the Nato bombardments in the
Balkans offers an opportunity to build a world-systems alternative to
the prevalent lines of analysis. There have emerged two positions. One
argues for the use of force (Nato, since really there isn't any other)
to prevent "humanitarian disasters"; the  opposing argument calls the
one-sided superpower warfare counterproductive on the grounds of
morality, international norms, double standard, and the looming
problems down the road. 


What strikes me is that nobody seems to notice how constrained and
profoundly weak are all the political actors in this unheroic tragedy. 



The US president no longer seems to have the option of playing the
"spineless charmer" seeking middle ground in every political issue. He
is  constrained domestically, he is even cornered. In Yugoslavia Mr.
Clinton attempted the role of benevolent tough guy -- and looked very
unconvincing. The problem, however, is not in the personality or the
political circumstances of Mr. Clinton. The problem arises from the
very geopolitics and the new geoculture of the world-system. 


The extinction of the 20th century state developomentalism (what
Wallerstein once called "Leninism with Marxism or without") and the
recent emancipation of capital from the territorially-bound state and
social controls (what is the essence of globalization) creates a
situation that probably never existed before. Large (very large) areas
and populations that were previously integrated into the modern
world-system and had a stake in it appear now permanently redundant.
Africa can be ignored rather safely -- its disruptive capacity is too
low to threaten the reproduction of capitalist world-economy. Not only
Rwanda but Algires could be ignored. Kosovo is different in only one
respect -- it is too closely situated to Western Europe. Therefore the
dilemma -- an area that is uncomfortably near to the core which is not
even peripheral but maginal (in the modern world there is something
worse than being exploited -- it is being left out and unexploited).
How and who can reign in such a place when it plunges into turmoil, how
to make the delivery of dole to the jobless populations minimally safe?
This wasn't a problem in 1945-1989. Communism and national
developmentalism were once mighty detractors conducive to
self-organization of former peripheries and semi-peripheries and their
political intergration into the interstate system the geoculture of
reformism. But these political projects went bankrupt in the early
1980s.


Mr. Clinton is not an imperialist. He is certainly not about to conquer
and exploit former Yugoslavia. He is under pressure to use the US state
capacity in ensuring that such marginal areas do not disrupt world
order (even if with the appalling sight of their sufferings and the
streams of refugees). Mr. Clinton is very much constrained by the lack
of adequate resources (no Marshall Plan is conceivable today) and
ideology (what promise can he offer to Serbs and Albanians or, for that
matter, Russians or Ukrainians?) 


Meantime Washington  is overflowing with the redundant institutions and
their political and bureaucratic personnel who lost its rationale with
the end of the Cold War. Institutional inertia of the Cold War is huge.
(Same but even more applies to Moscow and, perhaps, to Belgrade ‹ let
us not forget that Belgrade only ten years ago was capital of the
militarily strongest among the "Non-Aligned" states). In this situation
Nato is an easy temptation, and perhaps an insistent one. But it is
also grossly unfit even as a purely coercive mechanism (cruise missiles
were designed for superpower warfare and display, not to fight ethnic
paramilitaries), let alone the legal, moral, political aspects of the
Nato actions and the further implications.


Miloshevich is the only Communist nomenklatura head of state in Eastern
Europe who preserved power during the revolutionary upheaval of
1989-1991. His strategy was brutally simple ‹ to replace the defunct
ideology and politics of Marxist-Leninist state developmentalism with
the mythology of nationalism (rather than the mythology of Liberalism,
as tried by Gorbachev and, at least initially, by Yeltsin). This worked
for Miloshevich in the short term but his success was the undoing of
Yugoslav state and the bifurcation of its economy with Slovenia and
Croatia moving into the reformulated European semi-periphery while
Serbia and the rest of post-Yugoslav territories were falling into
marginality. Ten years after he had invested (and channelled the
politics of Serbia) in radical nationalism Miloshevich finds himself
caught in severe path dependency. He plays (so far successfully) the
same game all over again despite the suicidal prospects of further
"Balkanization" and the degeneration of Serbian state into the warlord
realm not unlike much of Africa.


Yeltsin and Russian politicians are caught between indignation and
impotence. The promise of speedy Westernization has failed them long
ago, in 1992-1993. They tried to switch to rebuilding the Russian state
along the more traditional imperial lines -- and failed miserably in
Chechnya. The Commonwealth of Independent States was designed to be a
novel informal empire and Russia's own periphery (without the political
and economic burdens that had ruined the overcentralized USSR). It
never took off ‹ who would chose such an impoverished and impotent
master as the Russia of the 1990s? At the same time, the expansion of
Nato to the exclusion of Russia demonstrated that there would be no
invitation into the core or at least into the European semi-periphery.
Worse, the financial crisis of August 1998 dashed the hopes that at
least some areas (mostly the city of Moscow) and at least some social
groups (the "new middle class", the Russian provincial yuppies) could
successfully re-negotiate their positions and identity within the
(re-)globalizing world-economy. 


The Russian elite is disoriented, they no longer seem capable even of
muddling through as they have been doing since 1992. Russia was
overwhelmed by what Michael Burawoy wryly called "the industrial
involution" ‹ the monetization of the 1990s in fact reproduced and made
much more apparent the familiar ills of Brezhnev's stagnation. In many
respects Yeltsin is indeed Brezhnev today, only much smaller. There
will be no World War III simply because there is no military match for
the Nato -- not even remotely. Yet, as Anatol Lieven put it (see his
brilliant book on Chechnya: The Tombstone of Russian Power,  Yale Univ.
Press), Russia is "DISARMED AND DANGEROUS". It avoided the Serbian path
of communist extinction in 1989 but a decade later the post-Soviet
elite  might be constrained to the same downward pattern of
marginalization with radical nationalism being the only available
ideology and (opium of the people) explanation of the hostile world
increasingly entertained by the common Russians. 


Political mass consciousness in Russia is struggling to identify the
cause of trouble. The neo-Liberal belief in markets, unlike other
matters of faith, requires sufficient means of payment in order to be
sustained. It is probably unjust to accuse the global capitalists of
robbing former Soviet citizens. The robbers who directly profited from
the inherited Soviet industrial park (oil, aluminum, military hardware,
etc.) and the residual special status of Russian state (which for a
while allowed its ruling elites to plunder the priviliged IMF credits)
were certainly some well-known fellow countrymen. What is much worse,
contrary to the optimistic excuses, the period of plunder failed to
become the capitalist primary accumulation. Russians and other former
Soviet populations were bypassed by the global flows of capital and
left in the world¹s largest pool of structurally unemployed labor. The
native robber barons, big and small, mightily contributed to such an
outcome by creating local environments impossible for foreign
investment and barely tolerable for themselves. Of course, most
Russians see and understand that. The question is in what terms can
they frame their understanding and in what projects can they place
their hopes of coping with chaos ‹ when all projects seem irrelevant,
utopian, or cruel mockery? 


After 1989 capitalism won in the sense that it appeared the system
without sensible alternatives ‹ of course, the advanced core-like
imagery of capitalism promoted by the current geocultural mainstream.
The discreditation of various socialist and national-liberation
projects in the 1980s consolidated the field of geoculture to a very
crude binary opposition ‹ Capitalism and its rejections, expressed
mostly in the localized discourses of nationalism and fundamentalism. 
The logic is simple. If capitalism appears invulnerable as political
economy, then the antisystemic sentiments would have to be expressed
primarily in moral and culturalist terms. The shortest expression of
new geopolitics and the geoculture of the 1990s indeed is Huntington¹s
³<italic>the West and the Rest</italic>². 


 Ironically, such situation of pervasive weakness is conducive to the
continued reproduction of relative stability at a low point amidst the
spots of acute crisis, social decay,  family disintegration, crime,
corruption, substance abuse. The longer-term outcome could resemble the
dilemma of American inner cities at a global level ‹ areas and
populations made redundant to the process of capital accumulation, that
are costly in every respect, and just won¹t disappear. Russia, unlike
the American inner cities, still preserves a set of state institutions
and a memory of strong army. In the longer run all prophecies, when
repeated enough times, become self-fulfilling. By eliciting and
structuring fundamentalist responses the geoculture of the <italic>West
and the rest</italic> becomes itself a major factor of systemic
instability. Fundamentalist reactions are one of few currently
available responses to the process of peripheral involution and the
geoculture of globalization. At least in short term marginalization and
fundamentalism reinforce the globalization trend by skipping over the
economically marginal areas and providing a rationale for doing so.
What kind of effects this may bring in longer term remains a range of
contested possibilities.

</fontfamily>
Georgi M. Derluguian

Assistant Professor

Department of Sociology

Northwestern University

1812 Chicago Avenue

Evanston, Illinois 60208-1330

(847) 491-2741 (rabota)