MILLENNIUM
COUNTDOWN
The US ruled the last century and will rule the next. What will it do with its power, asks Madeleine Bunting
The 20th century was designated as having belonged to the United States long before we saw its end looming. As early as the Forties its combination of military strength evident in Europe and the Pacific in World War II, and its economic prosperity seemed unassailable. And for much of the Fifties it was – with the help of Elvis Presley and Hollywood. Then came the Vietnam war and the challenge of the Soviet Union, and a few insecure decades followed. But now, on the threshold of the millennium, it is already possible to predict that the next century will belong to the US too.
It saw off the USSR in the Cold War. It has seen off a challenge to its economic ascendancy from Japan, which is now struggling with its worst depression since the war. The US is enjoying an unprecedented economic boom. The Dow index has leapt from 2 000 at the start of the decade to a staggering 11 000.
The next great stage on which we can expect the US to strut its economic strength is in the millennium round of the World Trade Organisation, which opens in Seattle in November. These trade negotiations will have a huge impact – affecting the environment, the economies of developing countries and what consumers eat and wear all over the globe.
Major US multinationals are already paying for their ringside seat to manipulate its proceedings. It emerged last month, to the horror of politicians on both sides of the Atlantic, that Microsoft, Hewlett Packard, General Motors, Ford Motor Company and Northwest Airlines are paying up to $250 000 for “preferential seating placements” to meets heads of state, ministers and delegates to facilitate their lobbying.
Kosovo brought it brutally home that the US has an unchallengeable political and military domination. It was a province that few Americans could place on a map and was clearly within the European sphere of influence. But Europe proved incapable of sorting out its own problems: it lacked anything like the military infrastructure needed to mount the bombing campaign.
When discussions about a land invasion began, dependence on the US was embarrassingly blatant. No one could argue with US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s arrogant description of the US as “the indispensable nation”. As the new Nato Secretary General, George Robertson, pointed out last month, European countries spend on arms the equivalent of two-thirds of the US defence budget, but have nothing like two-thirds of the US defence capability because of duplication.
The new European Union commissioner for external affairs, Chris Patten, talks of the urgent need to improve European defence co-operation, but it is not an issue that will be either easily or quickly resolved. US military dominance will be secure well into the next century.
The secret of the US stranglehold over the next century, however, is its prime place in the information revolution. Already, 26% of Americans use the Web compared with 3% of Russians; the US has more computers than the rest of the world combined.
Given that base, two things are happening. First, US technological development is pulling further and further ahead, and developing unprecedented marketing muscle. Second, Americans are establishing a dominance in the marketplace of the future, in e-commerce. Latecomers will simply never, ever, be able to catch up.
All of this sits alongside the much quieter, but pervasive Coca-Cola culture, which in the course of the past 50 years has reached every corner of the globe. Television shows have carried US values and aspirations into billions of homes in a cultural reach that is historically unprecedented. The Roman empire lasted hundreds of years, but it never envisaged enlisting more than a tiny elite in its conquered territories to its way of life – Virgil, villas and togas. In the 20th century, jeans, baseball caps and Disney have gone global.
So what will the US do with all this power and wealth? There is only one clear answer to the question – make a lot more money. Beyond that there seems to be no ambition.
With the end of the Cold War there has been no ideological enemy to fight. Islamic fundamentalism has simply not materialised as the global threat that some predicted. Kosovo showed up the US lack of political ambition. President Bill Clinton had no narrative to sell a Kosovan war to the voters, and dithered; it was British Prime Minister Tony Blair who came up with the doctrine of “international community”. Countries with this kind of power ultimately develop an ideology to justify it.
European colonial empires were built on the “white man’s burden” to civilise the world. And that drew inspiration from the Roman empire’s perception of its civilising mission. Pax Britannicus was a foreign policy principle that had little to do with peace and everything to do with emulating Roman imperial encouragement of trade.
The mistake is to think that the lack of ideology is necessarily benign. Its absence indicates that the US domination is not driven by politicians and electorates, but by big business. Indeed they manipulate and corrupt the democratic process to advance their interests.
The closest historical parallel is with Britain’s early days in India in the 17th century, when the East India Company nabobs first began the lucrative drugs and arms trade. They brought home huge personal wealth with scant regard for the devastation they left behind in the wars they sponsored and the Indian states they destabilised. The rationale was making money, and there are plenty of country houses dotted around England to prove how good they were at it, just as Bill Gates and his fellow Microsoft millionaires are now building their grandiose mansions.
This is the smash-and-grab principle of economic dominance, and there is not much benign about it; it exploits and perpetuates global economic inequality while stripping countries of their irreplaceable environmental assets.