The Fall of the US Empire: Global Fault-Lines and the Shifting Imperial Order - Softcover

Fouskas, Vassilis K.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0745326439 ISBN 13: 9780745326436

Verlag: Pluto Press, 2012

Inhaltsangabe

Whither the US empire? Despite Washington's military supremacy, its economic foundations have been weakening since the Vietnam war - accelerated by the great recession and credit-rating downgrade - and its global authority dented by the quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan. In this accessible, punchy text, Vassilis K. Fouskas and Bülent Gökay intervene in the debates that surround the US's status as an Empire. They survey the arguments amongst Marxist and critical scholars, from Immanuel Wallerstein and others who argue that the US is in decline, to those who maintain that it remains a robust superpower. By explaining how America's neo-imperial system of governance has been working since WWII, Fouskas and Gökay link the US's domestic and foreign vulnerabilities. The Fall of the US Empire argues that the time has come to understand the US empire not by its power but by its systemic vulnerabilities of financialisation, resource depletion and environmental degradation. Its informed and accessible style will have wide appeal to students looking for an introduction to these issues.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Vassilis K. Fouskas is Professor of International Relations at Richmond University, London and the founding editor of the Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies. He is the author of Cyprus: The Post-Imperial Constitution (with Alex O. Tackie, Pluto, 2009), The New American Imperialism (with Bülent Gökay, 2005), The Politics of Conflict (editor, 2007, 2010) and Zones of Conflict (Pluto, 2003). He is an editor of globalfaultlines.com and a member of the editorial board of Debatte.

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The Fall of the US Empire

Global Fault-Lines and the Shifting Imperial Order

By Vassilis K. Fouskas, Bülent Gökay

Pluto Press

Copyright © 2012 Vassilis K. Fouskas and Bülent Gökay
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-7453-2643-6

Contents

Acknowledgements, ix, 
List of abbreviations, xii, 
Introduction, xv, 
Box: a definition of global fault-lines, xviii, 
1 Global fault-lines, 1, 
2 From Bretton Woods to the abyss of globalization, 1944–71, 33, 
3 The failure of financial statecraft (1), 1971–91, 57, 
4 The failure of financial statecraft (2), 1991–2011, 77, 
5 The power shift to the global East, 111, 
6 Resource depletion and environmental degradation, 133, 
Conclusion, 142, 
Notes, 153, 
References, 176, 
Websites, 188, 
Index, 189, 

CHAPTER 1

GLOBAL FAULT-LINES

The most specific feature of this social group, which separates it from the proletariat and the bourgeoisie alike, is its alienation from economic life. This group does not participate in productive activities or in commercial transactions; its representatives, at times, do not even bother to show up to cash out the bonds with their own hands. This is why we can consider this group as being one that becomes active only in the sphere of consumption. The foundation of the entire life of the rentier is consumption – and the psychology of 'pure consumption' becomes their 'lifestyle'.

Nikolai Bukharin, Die Politische Ökonomie des Rentners, 1914 (Verlag für Literatur und Politik, 1926)

PRELIMINARY OBSERVATIONS

There is some analytical confusion concerning the literature on globalization (a term invented in the West to serve specific purposes), financialization and the state. Here, we confine ourselves to setting out some conceptual and methodological propositions/ clarifications in order to pave the ground for a critique of some of the most influential works on the current financial crisis.

A good starting point could be to clarify the linkages between the domestic and external domains of state activity, what old-fashioned realist theory in international relations (IR) calls 'second' and 'third' (or systemic) 'images'. These two analytical instances of social and political action are intrinsically interlinked, and at the same time relatively distinct, not least because of the differing policy practices, institutional structures and jurisdictions that pertain to each one of them. But mainstream IR does not take into account a 'fourth image', that of the empire-state. This 'image'/category or ideal-type is as significant as the other two categories, not least because it determines the key structures, practices and actions of them. For instance, as we have shown elsewhere, the US empire-state determines the policy and ideational contours of its key Eurasian allies (Europe, Japan, Middle Eastern and Latin American states) through hub-and-spoke arrangements, although the subordinate states in the imperial chain maintain a relative autonomy in order to organize class hegemony and other security interests in their respective domestic/national domains. In other words, subaltern states can question and challenge each other on certain issues, and they can also implement certain policies independently, but all these initiatives cannot challenge the fundamentals of supremacy of the empire-state – its class and security interests – by, for example, allying with a major rival. Having said this, we would put forward at this point three important propositions reflecting contemporary reality and settings:

• What came to be called as neoliberalism/neoconservatism in the wake of the Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan 'revolutions' since 1979 applies, predominately but not exclusively, to the domestic environment of the capitalist state.

• What has commonly been called globalization, a term popularized under the Bill Clinton administration in the 1990s, should be seen as a policy of rampant financialization that, predominately but not exclusively, applies to the external environment of the capitalist state.

• The US empire-state is the lead agency of this Atlantic/ Eurocentric globalization/financialization and neoliberalism, dictating policy to other core, but not all, capitalist states and peripheries via hub-and-spoke arrangements, even if those states and regional blocs maintain a relative autonomy for class, and sometimes security/military, purposes. For example, these states or regions need a relative autonomy from the US hub in order to organize political hegemony over their respective populations. They do not always succumb to US pressure. In fact, at times, they oppose US policies (for instance, the conflict between the European Union and the United States on trade issues).

But globalization did not begin in the 1990s. Strictly speaking, globalization is directly linked to the process of the liberalization of banking and finance that began in the wake of the collapse of the Bretton Woods system in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This breakdown was not the result of a spontaneous collapse of the dollar–gold parity. In fact, it was a politically conscientious decision taken by the Richard Nixon administration as a response to the pressure exercised on the dollar's gold link by the other two caucuses of capitalist accumulation, notably Japan, on the one hand, and France and Western Germany on the other. The move away from the fixed exchange rates regime and the ability of the US state to set the price of the dollar without any obligation to any constraint, initiated new forms of money circulation and profiteering on the basis of what we can call 'financialization via dollarization'. This means that since the end of Bretton Woods, financial operators (individuals, investment banks, hedge funds and so on) could take advantage of the freed money markets and set benchmarks of moving cash and paper around – in the form of securities, derivatives, bonds, gambling in the stock market and so on – on the basis of the floating dollar, now the key global and unfettered reserve currency. This is a key feature of the post-1971 phase of globalization/ financialization. It is interesting to note that Nixon's decision to place the entire global capitalist economy on a dollar standard was immediately accompanied by an agreement with the Saudi oligarchy that oil trade be denominated in dollars. Among others, the aim of this agreement was that the surplus of dollars resulting from petroleum trade be invested in US Treasury bills, which in turn would help the United States to refinance its current account deficit and other debt obligations, including defence spending. This is exactly what has been happening since, the sole difference being that other US Treasury bill buyers became increasingly important, most notably Japan in the 1980s and 1990s and China more recently. Having said this, we would argue that both policies, that of globalization/financialization (predominately systemic) and that of neoliberalism (predominately domestic), were initiated by the Anglo-American alliance, trying to relaunch and revamp the policy envisaged in Bretton Woods and which Richard Gardner had accurately called 'sterling–dollar diplomacy'.

As we know from the work of Adam Smith, Karl Marx and other social theorists, forms of globalization and financialization are innate to capitalist modernity, and so they existed before the 1970s – we will also...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Pluto Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2012
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0745326439
• ISBN 13: 9780745326436
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 216
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland