Category: Global trends & events

An American idol: The U.S. should ‘govern’ the world?

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By Richard Falk

Prefatory Note:
This post consists of a much expanded text of an opinion piece that was published by AJE on January 18, 2014; it seeks to discredit imperial and neoliberal claims that the United States is a benevolent hegemon, providing global public goods to the world as a whole, including supposed geopolitical and ideological rivals.

It might not have seemed necessary in the 21st century to ask or answer such a ridiculous question. After all, in the last half of the prior century European colonialism collapsed politically, morally, and even legally, its pretensions and cruelties thoroughly exposed and totally discredited. As well, the Soviet empire fell apart.

And yet there are those who muster the temerity to insist that even now it is only the global governing authority of the United States that underpins the degree of security and prosperity that currently exists in the world. Without such a role played by the United States, this reasoning alleges, there would be widespread chaos, economic stagnancy, and far more frequent international warfare.

Not surprisingly, the proponents of this conception of world order as dependent on U.S. military, economic, diplomatic, and ideological capabilities are themselves exclusively American. It is even less surprising that the most articulate celebrants of this new variant of a self-serving imperial approach to global security and prosperity are situated either in mainstream academic institutions or in supposedly liberal media outlets.

I consider Michael Mandelbaum to be the most unabashed and articulate advocate of this American ‘global domination project’ that he felicitously calls ‘the world’s de facto government.’ Read More »

Challenging China

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By Jonathan Power

The West, the US especially, has got itself into a fretful mood over the rise of China. Quite unnecessarily so. The Chinese growth rate is slowing. As a BBC commentator said today, reviewing this week’s government-issued statistics, China never will hit double digit growth again. Glitzy Shanghai, Guangzhou, Chengdu and their like, where growth is still well over 10% a year, make up only a part of China’s economy.

Much of the country has an income per head more akin to Ecuador. Read More »

Ten conflicts, solutions and conciliation

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By Johan Galtung

2014: there are conflicts old and new crying for solution and conciliation, not violence; with reasonable, realistic ways out.

Take the South Sudan conflict between the Nuer and the Dinka. We know the story of the borders drawn by the colonial powers, confirmed in Berlin in 1884. Change a border by splitting a country – referendum or not – and what do you expect opening Pandora’s Box? More Pandora.

There is a solution: not drawing borders, making them irrelevant. The former Sudan could have become a federation with much autonomy, keeping some apart and others together in confederations-communities, also across borders. Much to learn from Switzerland, EU and ASEAN.Read More »

Beholding 2014

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By Richard Falk
Written on December 31, 2013

2013 was not a happy year in the chronicles of human history, yet there were a few moves in the directions of peace and justice.

What follows are some notes that respond to the mingling of light and shadows that are flickering on the global stage, with a spotlight placed on the main war zone of the 21st century – the Middle East, recalling that Europe had this negative honor for most of the modern era except for the long 19th century, and that the several killing fields of sub-Saharan Africa are located at the periphery of political vision, and thus their reality remains blurred for distant observers. Read More »

Good cheer at the end of the year – 2013

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By Jonathan Power

We have a lot to be thankful for in 2013.

Look at the protests now going on in Bangkok. After some initial clashes at the beginning both sides have become non-violent. One can praise the government of Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra for this. She ordered the gates and doors of the ministry of the interior, of the police and the Thai equivalent of Scotland Yard/FBI to be opened. The protesters poured into the buildings and then left – bored.

In the Ukraine after a couple of nights of police brutality President Vikto Yanukovych ordered the police to restrain themselves. Both sides now use peaceful tactics.

Non-violence à la Gandhi and Martin Luther King doesn’t always achieve its objectives, but it keeps the political temperature down and avoids many deaths. It is more likely to work when there is a grave injustice. This is not the case either in Thailand or Ukraine. Indeed in Thailand it is the middle class protesting at the government’s policies of favouring the poor and the rural peasantry, although the demonstrators are not trying to take away the progress the poor have already made. Read More »

A Christian peace?

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By Johan Galtung

What a Christmas gift to all of us from that amazing Pope Francis, his first Message for the World Day of Peace, Fraternity, the Foundation and Pathway to Peace. A tightly reasoned statement in ten sections; here is an effort to summarize some key points:

1. An irrepressible wish for fraternity enables us to see others not as enemies or rivals, but as brothers and sisters. However, reference to a common Father is needed; otherwise it becomes “a mere do ut des /I give so that you give/ which is both pragmatic and selfish”.

2. The story of Cain and Abel /the first brothers, sons of the first couple, Adam and Eve/ “teaches that we have an inherent calling to fraternity, but also the tragic capacity to betray that calling”: Cain killed Abel out of jealousy because God preferred Abel.

3. Human fraternity is regenerated in and by Jesus Christ through his death and resurrection–the Cross is the definitive foundational focus of that fraternity-/no/ separation between the people of the Covenant and the Gentiles–not party to the pact of the Promise.

4. Fraternity is the foundation and pathway–peace is work, an opus solidaritatis, a duty of solidarity, of social justice, of universal charity, of a more human and sustainable development.Read More »

The United States of America – Where is it heading?

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By Johan Galtung


Washington-DC

In the shorter run, till around 2020, not good; in the longer run, from 2030, not bad at all. Short-run possibilities:

Politically: post-democracy, Congress more accountable to business than to people for election; the top executive power possibly sliding from the president to the supreme court justice, with money steering politics, protected as “freedom of expression”; Snowden-type revelations coming from once a year to once a month, once a week.

Economically: runaway inflation; accelerating inequality; deep misery affecting one third to a half of the population; depression.

Militarily: coup by evangelical fundamentalists to “give us our country back”/”give our, empire, our world”; using war to restore the economy; a temporary strong hand “to get things going”.

Culturally: declining faith in a covenant with a universal God as the Exceptional Chosen People; anomie, absence of compelling norms.

Socially: atomie, lacking social tissue, leading to collective and individual depression; increase in suicide and homicide (some by veterans back from meaningless wars); increasing “accidents” – cars, trains, planes – due to sloppiness, “don’t care”; school etc. massacres from once a year to once a week by suicidals taking others with them; general social malfunctioning; Jews used as scapegoats for the ills with rampant anti-Semitism, seeing Israel increasingly as a liability.Read More »

Where is the global economy heading?

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By Johan Galtung
Washington-DC

Charles Darwin, in The Voyage of the Beagle, has a passage where he condemns an egalitarian native people on the tip of South America to stay primitive. Development presupposes inequality, having chiefs – human, animals, races – to look up to and learn from; no word wasted on the humans, animals or races at the bottom. And the evolution theory emerging from a mind thus pre-programmed is obvious: competition, struggle for survival, not mutual aid, as the substitute narrative for Genesis 1:20-28, 4th to 6th day–but without God.

However, a man of God, Pope Francis – if anyone is saving Western civilization from itself it is he, not economic growth presidents/PMs – comes out and decries inequality and “trickle-down economics” in particular as a “crude and naive trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power” (Washington Post, 27 Nov 2013, p. 1). Or, maybe “those wielding intellectual power”, the servants, the economists, rather?

Look at BRICS, 45 percent of the world’s population, 25 percent of the Gross World Product, GWP. NO to inequality and trickle-down: Brazil under Lula-Rousseff, Russia with revolution, China lifts the bottom up, South Africa breaks down Apartheid. India has some trickle-down, but social walls are too strong to break. The Social Protection Index of the Asian Development Bank is three times higher in China than in India (Japan is almost three times China–starting distribution already in the 1870s).

But the USA and EU have increasing inequalities. Read More »

NSA and the fall of the U.S. Empire

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By Johan Galtung

The linchpin of an empire is the link between two elites, one in the imperial center and the other in the peripheries. Symmetric alliances exist, but not with a superpower in the center.

The periphery elites do jobs for the center: killing, say, in Libya, Syria, when so wanted; securing the center economic interests in return for a substantial cut, serving as a bridgehead culturally–called americanization–delivering obedience against protection.

For this to work the elites have to believe in the empire. They put words up front–like democracy, human rights, rule of law–serving as human shields. However, the costs may be heavy, the benefits decreasing; they may have difficulties with restless students, working classes, other countries. Or worse: they may sense that the empire is not working, heading for decline and fall, and want to get out.

And even if this is not the case, the US elites – the policy officials – may suspect it to be and spy on empire-alliance leaders:

[Director of the NSA] General Keith Alexander: “NSA–was asked by /US/ policy officials to discover the “leadership intentions” of foreign countries. If you want to know leadership intentions, these were the issues” (english@other-news.info 01-11-13).

Clear from the beginning, beyond “threats to privacy”, “they all do it”, “it was technically feasible”, and similar smoke screens. Spying on intentions of enemy leaders–the “humint” (HUMan INTelligence) to complement capabilities–is an obvious part of the state system. But on allies?

Even more so. There are allies and allies; empires may decline. Foreign leaders may not offer full obedience in return for protection. Or may not accept US views as accurate, but have their own. They may even explore options. Their real intentions are crucial, and nobody can spy and supervise better than their own secret agencies – coordinated by CIA-NSA–and in their own language. Alexander said the obvious: “policy officials” (ambassadors, etc.) and alliance agencies spying together on policy-makers. The real power elite inside the elite.

Look at this through Angela Merkel’s eyes. She hated the DDR-Deutsche Demokratische Republik Stasi surveillance. But they were amateurs; these people are professionals. A decade went unnoticed, till Snowden. Imagine her rage, comparing.

And imagine the non-rage over the same in Spain: beyond Franco, yes, but Rajoy’s party (Partido Popular) is the – highly corrupt –successor to Franco.Read More »

The U.S. calamities: There are solutions

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By Johan Galtung

Political terrorism failed. The House Republicans used voting in one US chamber to put millions of people inside and outside the US at livelihood risk for their own political goals. And made the mistake of most terrorists, non-state or state: when people suffer they will join us, against our enemy; to find out that people turn against the terrorists instead. And they were not a small group of Tea Party extremists but a clear majority of the House Republicans: 144 voted NO in the end, only 87 YES.

Obama has himself to thank for the general House Republican majority; having betrayed most groups voting for him in 2008 he was punished in the 2010 mid-term elections. Like the Republicans will be in 2014 for their political terrorism.Read More »