The upheavals of
the early 21st century have changed our world. Now, in the aftermath of failed
wars and economic disasters, pressure for a social alternative can only grow
 |
| Delegates cast their votes at the Scottish National party conference. Photograph: Danny Lawson/PA |
| by Seumas
Milne
( October 21,
2012, London, Sri Lanka Guardian ) In
the late summer of 2008, two events in quick succession signalled the end of
the New World Order. In August, the US client state of Georgia was crushed in a
brief but bloody war after it attacked Russian troops in the contested
territory of South Ossetia.
The former
Soviet republic was a favourite of Washington's neoconservatives. Its
authoritarian president had been lobbying hard for Georgia to join Nato's
eastward expansion. In an unblinking inversion of reality, US vice-president
Dick Cheney denounced Russia's response as an act of "aggression" that
"must not go unanswered". Fresh from unleashing a catastrophic war on
Iraq, George Bush declared Russia's "invasion of a sovereign state"
to be "unacceptable in the 21st century".
As the fighting
ended, Bush warned Russia not to recognise South Ossetia's independence. Russia
did exactly that, while US warships were reduced to sailing around the Black
Sea. The conflict marked an international turning point. The US's bluff had
been called, its military sway undermined by the war on terror, Iraq and Afghanistan.
After two decades during which it bestrode the world like a colossus, the years
of uncontested US power were over.
Three weeks
later, a second, still more far-reaching event threatened the heart of the
US-dominated global financial system. On 15 September, the credit crisis
finally erupted in the collapse of America's fourth-largest investment bank.
The bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers engulfed the western world in its deepest
economic crisis since the 1930s.
The first decade
of the 21st century shook the international order, turning the received wisdom
of the global elites on its head – and 2008 was its watershed. With the end of
the cold war, the great political and economic questions had all been settled,
we were told. Liberal democracy and free-market capitalism had triumphed.
Socialism had been consigned to history. Political controversy would now be
confined to culture wars and tax-and-spend trade-offs.
In 1990, George
Bush Senior had inaugurated a New World Order, based on uncontested US military
supremacy and western economic dominance. This was to be a unipolar world
without rivals. Regional powers would bend the knee to the new worldwide
imperium. History itself, it was said, had come to an end.
But between the
attack on the Twin Towers and the fall of Lehman Brothers, that global order
had crumbled. Two factors were crucial. By the end of a decade of continuous
warfare, the US had succeeded in exposing the limits, rather than the extent,
of its military power. And the neoliberal capitalist model that had reigned
supreme for a generation had crashed.
It was the
reaction of the US to 9/11 that broke the sense of invincibility of the world's
first truly global empire. The Bush administration's wildly miscalculated
response turned the atrocities in New York and Washington into the most
successful terror attack in history.
Not only did
Bush's war fail on its own terms, spawning terrorists across the world, while
its campaign of killings, torture and kidnapping discredited Western claims to
be guardians of human rights. But the US-British invasions of Afghanistan and
Iraq revealed the inability of the global behemoth to impose its will on
subject peoples prepared to fight back. That became a strategic defeat for the
US and its closest allies.
This passing of
the unipolar moment was the first of four decisive changes that transformed the
world – in some crucial ways for the better. The second was the fallout from
the crash of 2008 and the crisis of the western-dominated capitalist order it
unleashed, speeding up relative US decline.
This was a
crisis made in America and deepened by the vast cost of its multiple wars. And
its most devastating impact was on those economies whose elites had bought most
enthusiastically into the neoliberal orthodoxy of deregulated financial markets
and unfettered corporate power.
A voracious
model of capitalism forced down the throats of the world as the only way to run
a modern economy, at a cost of ballooning inequality and environmental
degradation, had been discredited – and only rescued from collapse by the
greatest state intervention in history. The baleful twins of neoconservatism
and neoliberalism had been tried and tested to destruction.
The failure of
both accelerated the rise of China, the third epoch-making change of the early
21st century. Not only did the country's dramatic growth take hundreds of
millions out of poverty, but its state-driven investment model rode out the
west's slump, making a mockery of market orthodoxy and creating a new centre of
global power. That increased the freedom of manoeuvre for smaller states.
China's rise
widened the space for the tide of progressive change that swept Latin America –
the fourth global advance. Across the continent, socialist and
social-democratic governments were propelled to power, attacking economic and
racial injustice, building regional independence and taking back resources from
corporate control. Two decades after we had been assured there could be no
alternatives to neoliberal capitalism, Latin Americans were creating them.
These momentous
changes came, of course, with huge costs and qualifications. The US will remain
the overwhelmingly dominant military power for the foreseeable future; its
partial defeats in Iraq and Afghanistan were paid for in death and destruction
on a colossal scale; and multipolarity brings its own risks of conflict. The
neoliberal model was discredited, but governments tried to refloat it through
savage austerity programmes. China's success was bought at a high price in
inequality, civil rights and environmental destruction. And Latin America's
US-backed elites remained determined to reverse the social gains, as they
succeeded in doing by violent coup in Honduras in 2009. Such contradictions
also beset the revolutionary upheaval that engulfed the Arab world in 2010-11,
sparking another shift of global proportions.
By then, Bush's
war on terror had become such an embarrassment that the US government had to
change its name to "overseas contingency operations". Iraq was almost
universally acknowledged to have been a disaster, Afghanistan a doomed
undertaking. But such chastened realism couldn't be further from how these
campaigns were regarded in the western mainstream when they were first
unleashed.
To return to
what was routinely said by British and US politicians and their tame pundits in
the aftermath of 9/11 is to be transported into a parallel universe of toxic
fantasy. Every effort was made to discredit those who rejected the case for
invasion and occupation – and would before long be comprehensively vindicated.
Michael Gove,
now a Tory cabinet minister, poured vitriol on the Guardian for publishing a
full debate on the attacks, denouncing it as a "Prada-Meinhof gang"
of "fifth columnists". Rupert Murdoch's Sun damned those warning
against war as "anti-American propagandists of the fascist left".
When the Taliban regime was overthrown, Blair issued a triumphant condemnation
of those (myself included) who had opposed the invasion of Afghanistan and war
on terror. We had, he declared, "proved to be wrong".
A decade later,
few could still doubt that it was Blair's government that had "proved to
be wrong", with catastrophic consequences. The US and its allies would
fail to subdue Afghanistan, critics predicted. The war on terror would itself
spread terrorism. Ripping up civil rights would have dire consequences – and an
occupation of Iraq would be a blood-drenched disaster.
The war party's
"experts", such as the former "viceroy of Bosnia" Paddy
Ashdown, derided warnings that invading Afghanistan would lead to a
"long-drawn-out guerrilla campaign" as "fanciful". More
than 10 years on, armed resistance was stronger than ever and the war had become
the longest in American history.
It was a similar
story in Iraq – though opposition had by then been given voice by millions on
the streets. Those who stood against the invasion were still accused of being
"appeasers". US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld predicted the war
would last six days. Most of the Anglo-American media expected resistance to
collapse in short order. They were entirely wrong.
A new
colonial-style occupation of Iraq would, I wrote in the first week of invasion,
"face determined guerrilla resistance long after Saddam Hussein has
gone" and the occupiers "be driven out". British troops did
indeed face unrelenting attacks until they were forced out in 2009, as did US
regular troops until they were withdrawn in 2011.
But it wasn't
just on the war on terror that opponents of the New World Order were shown to
be right and its cheerleaders to be talking calamitous nonsense. For 30 years,
the west's elites insisted that only deregulated markets, privatisation and low
taxes on the wealthy could deliver growth and prosperity.
Long before
2008, the "free market" model had been under fierce attack:
neoliberalism was handing power to unaccountable banks and corporations,
anti-corporate globalisation campaigners argued, fuelling poverty and social
injustice and eviscerating democracy – and was both economically and
ecologically unsustainable.
In contrast to
New Labour politicians who claimed "boom and bust" to be a thing of
the past, critics dismissed the idea that the capitalist trade cycle could be
abolished as absurd. Deregulation, financialisation and the reckless promotion
of debt-fuelled speculation would, in fact, lead to crisis.
The large
majority of economists who predicted that the neoliberal model was heading for
breakdown were, of course, on the left. So while in Britain the main political
parties all backed "light-touch regulation" of finance, its opponents
had long argued that City liberalisation threatened the wider economy.
Critics warned
that privatising public services would cost more, drive down pay and conditions
and fuel corruption. Which is exactly what happened. And in the European Union,
where corporate privilege and market orthodoxy were embedded into treaty, the
result was ruinous. The combination of liberalised banking with an
undemocratic, lopsided and deflationary currency union that critics (on both
left and right in this case) had always argued risked breaking apart was a
disaster waiting to happen. The crash then provided the trigger.
The case against
neoliberal capitalism had been overwhelmingly made on the left, as had
opposition to the US-led wars of invasion and occupation. But it was strikingly
slow to capitalise on its vindication over the central controversies of the
era. Hardly surprising, perhaps, given the loss of confidence that flowed from
the left's 20th-century defeats – including in its own social alternatives.
But driving home
the lessons of these disasters was essential if they were not to be repeated.
Even after Iraq and Afghanistan, the war on terror was pursued in
civilian-slaughtering drone attacks from Pakistan to Somalia. The western
powers played the decisive role in the overthrow of the Libyan regime – acting
in the name of protecting civilians, who then died in their thousands in a
Nato-escalated civil war, while conflict-wracked Syria was threatened with
intervention and Iran with all-out attack.
And while
neoliberalism had been discredited, western governments used the crisis to try
to entrench it. Not only were jobs, pay and benefits cut as never before, but
privatisation was extended still further. Being right was, of course, never
going to be enough. What was needed was political and social pressure strong
enough to turn the tables of power.
Revulsion
against a discredited elite and its failed social and economic project steadily
deepened after 2008. As the burden of the crisis was loaded on to the majority,
the spread of protests, strikes and electoral upheavals demonstrated that
pressure for real change had only just begun. Rejection of corporate power and
greed had become the common sense of the age.
The historian
Eric Hobsbawm described the crash of 2008 as a "sort of right-wing
equivalent to the fall of the Berlin wall". It was commonly objected that
after the implosion of communism and traditional social democracy, the left had
no systemic alternative to offer. But no model ever came pre-cooked. All of
them, from Soviet power and the Keynesian welfare state to
Thatcherite-Reaganite neoliberalism, grew out of ideologically driven
improvisation in specific historical circumstances.
The same would
be true in the aftermath of the crisis of the neoliberal order, as the need to
reconstruct a broken economy on a more democratic, egalitarian and rational
basis began to dictate the shape of a sustainable alternative. Both the economic
and ecological crisis demanded social ownership, public intervention and a
shift of wealth and power. Real life was pushing in the direction of
progressive solutions.
The upheavals of
the first years of the 21st century opened up the possibility of a new kind of
global order, and of genuine social and economic change. As communists learned
in 1989, and the champions of capitalism discovered 20 years later, nothing is
ever settled.
This is an
edited extract from The Revenge of History: the Battle for the 21st Century by
Seumas Milne, published by Verso. Buy it for £16 at guardianbookshop.co.uk
