Samir Amin on NATO

Al-Ahram Weekly   Al-Ahram Weekly
   6 - 12 May 1999
   Issue No. 428 [black.gif]
   Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 [empty.gif]
   http://www.ahram.org.eg/weekly

                       The worst catastrophes imaginable

     By Samir Amin

     In my previous article (Al-Ahram Weekly, 29 April-5 May), I
     defined the goals and means of Washington's hegemonic ambitions.
     While the simplistic economicist discourse of neo-liberalism holds
     that the globalisation of a deregulated market (that is to say,
     regulated unilaterally by capital) should spontaneously produce
     peace and democracy, the facts prove that US military hegemony is
     the necessary condition for the functioning of this system,
     ensuring as it does both its domination by the Triad (US-Canada,
     Western Europe and Japan), and the submission of Europe and Japan
     to America's strategic objectives.

     To this vision of a unipolar world, I had opposed that of
     multipolar globalisation, the only strategy that would allow
     acceptable social development for the different regions of the
     world, and thereby the democratisation of societies and the
     reduction of motives for conflict. The US's strategic hegemony, I
     had concluded, is today the principal enemy of social progress,
     democracy and peace.

     The reply the dominant forces brought to the crises that have
     occurred in rapid succession since 1990 and the chaos engendered by

     the establishment of the neo-liberal utopia reveal both the US's
     hegemonic goals and the dissolution of the European project.

     The Gulf crisis had already revealed Washington's objectives.
     Secretly encouraging Saddam Hussein to invade Kuwait, the US turned

     the situation to its own benefit in order to establish a military
     protectorate over the petrol states of the region, with the
     blessing of Europe and the UN, domesticated for the occasion. The
     Iraqi regime's use of nerve gas against the Kurdish guerrilla
     movement, which had never bothered Western diplomatic circles
     before, was suddenly orchestrated by the media to justify the
     systematic destruction of Iraq.

     Encouraged by this first success, the United States then became
     involved in European affairs, exploiting the Yugoslavian crises in
     a bid to achieve a variety of objectives, not least the surrender
     of the European Union. It is not my intention to disregard the
     principal responsibilities of the fragmented local ruling classes,
     all of which chose ethnic chauvinism as a means of reconstituting,
     to their profit, a "legitimacy" to replace that of Tito-ism, which
     had been based on social progress and the equality of nations.
     Ethnic cleansing was therefore practiced by all these ruling
     classes, in Croatia (through the expulsion of the Serbs, a majority

     in Krajina) as in Bosnia (by each of the three components of this
     absurd state -- for, if coexistence is possible in the "little
     Yugoslavia", why would it not be so in the large one?) and in
     Serbia (Kosovo). But we must admit that Europe threw oil on the
     fire by its almost immediate acceptance of Slovenia and Croatia's
     unilaterally proclaimed independence, without the imposition of any

     conditions in terms of respect for the rights of the minorities
     created by the explosion of Yugoslavia. This decision could only
     serve to encourage the criminal regimes in question. The point was
     made at the time, but the media abstained from any critical
     analysis of the policy inaugurated, it must be said, by Germany,
     but which an initially reticent France resisted no longer than two
     weeks. Subsequently, the media systematically applied double
     standards, mobilising all the means at its disposal to denounce
     massacres in one place while ignoring them in another.

     The massacres in Kosovo and the provocation practiced by its
     "Liberation Army" (was it any better, at the outset, than the
     Basque ETA?) provided the pretext for the US's systematic
     intervention, already put to the test in Bosnia. This intervention
     is based on three principles: 1) the brutal replacement of the UN
     with NATO as the means of managing the international order; 2) the
     alignment of Europe with Washington's strategic objectives; 3) the
     adoption of military methods reinforcing American hegemony (no-risk

     bombing campaigns and the use of European troops for an eventual
     ground intervention).

     The consequences of these choices are catastrophic at all levels.
     They have deprived the dominant discourse on democracy and people's

     rights of any scrap of credibility. They reveal that the real
     strategic goal, beyond Serbia, is Russia and China -- a fact that
     American strategists do not refrain from stating. NATO, now openly
     the tool of American expansionism, and no longer that of European
     defence, has thereby been able to put an end to illusions of
     "European autonomy", forcing the EU into a new alignment, even more

     severe than that imposed in the past under the pretext of the "Cold

     War".

     The only option which would have had some meaning for Europe would
     have been to inscribe its construction within the perspective of a
     multipolar world. The margin of autonomy that this option defines
     would have allowed the invention of a socially valid project, in
     keeping with the best humanitarian and socialist European
     traditions. This option, of course, implied the recognition of the
     same margin of autonomy for Russia, China, and each of the large
     regions of the Third World. It also implied that the NATO page
     would be turned, once and for all, and replaced by the concept of a

     European defensive force, which could be integrated gradually at
     the rhythm of European political construction itself. It implied,
     furthermore, the conception of adequate modes of regulation at the
     European level, and at that of the world system, to replace the
     dominant forms: Bretton-Woods, the World Trade Organisation (WTO)
     and the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI). By choosing
     liberal globalisation, Europe has in fact renounced the use of its
     potential economic competitiveness, and been satisfied to navigate
     in the wake of Washington's ambitions, of which it has become the
     zealous servant.

     The fact that the European states have chosen this path reveals the

     frailty of the European project itself, and even the fact that this

     project is only a subaltern priority on the scale of dominant
     political visions. Great Britain's fundamental option since 1945
     has been to console itself for the loss of its imperial role by
     reliving it vicariously through the US. Germany, having given up
     the insane Nazi dream of world conquest, has chosen to limit its
     ambitions to the means at its disposal by reconstituting its
     traditional zone of influence in eastern and southeastern Europe,
     tailgating Washington's global hegemonic strategy. For somewhat
     similar reasons, Japan -- confronted with China, and even Korea --
     has also inscribed its strictly regional expansionist ambitions
     within the same global American perspective.

     Today, Blair and Schrder are, clearly, not only the most dangerous
     gravediggers of the traditions that were once the pride of the
     European left, but also the servile executors of America's
     anti-European project. Their association with Clinton in the
     so-called "Third Way" discourse must be the object of no illusions,

     for the new "Clinton doctrine" that has been announced aims --
     after Yugoslavia -- "to turn on the East and the Middle East".
     Robert I Hunter, senior adviser at the Rand Corporation and US
     ambassador to NATO from 1993 to '98, recently wrote the following
     in the Washington Post (21 April), with respect to the Clinton
     doctrine and its application in Kosovo: "It is the gateway to areas

     of intense Western concern -- the Arab-Israeli conflict, Iraq and
     Iran, Afghanistan, the Caspian Sea and Transcaucasia. Stability in
     southeastern Europe must be a precursor to protecting Western
     interests and reducing threats from farther East." Again, the only
     question is that of protecting Western interests (such as oil and
     pipelines, or the flourishing of McDonald's -- see my previous
     article), not democracy or the rights of Kurds and Palestinians.

     We must therefore expect a policy of systematic provocation in
     Russia and China. As for the Middle East, as it is clearly
     impossible to imagine the US bombing Israel to make it accept the
     Palestinian state and the return of refugees (the official motive
     for the intervention in Kosovo!), the use of force in Lebanon
     (where Hizbullah's "fanaticism" can serve as a pretext) and Syria
     (an "undemocratic" regime) will be the means of imposing the Pax
     Israeliana.

     Can the European project be saved from this debacle? Things being
     what they are, the only means of climbing back up the slope that
     leads to the eradication of the European project implies that the
     political forces attached to it -- in France, Germany or Italy --
     should rethink this project in terms of what is immediately
     possible -- in other words, in terms of a return to a more modest
     concept of a "Europe of nations", while waiting for the progressive

     ripening of cooperation. This in turn would imply a friendly -- and

     non-aggressive -- approach to Russia, China and the Third World
     and, in this framework, a revival of the UN's functions. Once
     again, this is not the option taken by the European governments,
     including the socialist majority. The priority given to the
     ultra-conservative management of a fictive single currency, the
     support for globalised liberalism and the US's hegemonic strategy
     are arrayed against the project of a multipolar world, and will
     lead to the worst catastrophes imaginable, for Europe and the rest
     of the world.
       ______________________________________________________________

     Translated from the French
     by Pascale Ghazaleh
--
"Adam Smith started with a view of the forest but his followers lost
themselves in the woods."
       --John R. Commons, 1934--