In her address to the World Social Forum in India earlier this year, Arundhati Roy picked a few bones with the world’s only superpower.
She is in good company. Most reasonable people would wish for a United States more enlightened and less frightening, and rejoice if the incumbent president decided to run for first man on Mars on a one-way ticket. But in her polemic Roy links the US to every evil under the sun and ends her tour de force of the human condition in the current world order (”Do turkeys enjoy Thanksgiving?”, January 23) on a chilling note. ”For these reasons,” she writes, ”we must consider ourselves at war.”
Since wars are unwelcome to most inhabitants of this planet and hardly ever the first best solution, her reasons are worth probing.
In essence, she makes four arguments. First, the US, in cahoots with its European sidekicks, is hellbent on running the world using gunboat diplomacy. Second, poor countries with anything of interest to the corporate masters of the universe must toe the US line lest they get bushwhacked. Third, keeping the majority of the world’s people poor is a condition for the global economy to work in the US’s interest. Fourth, even well-meaning leaders such as Brazilian President and former trade-union activist Luiz Inacio ”Lula” da Silvia or Nelson Mandela on home ground can’t be trusted to push the ”other-world” agenda of inclusive globalisation once in the government because institutional change is impossible.
These assertions are wrong. In reverse order, it is disingenuous to argue that Lula, while admirable in opposition, is at best hopeless in power. Governing Brazil is obviously different from running a trade union. Politics is the art of the possible. Yes, it means coming to terms with the power of international financial markets. Unfortunately, it also means disappointing many just demands of the landless movement. In short, it entails making bitter compromises. But if Brazil has a chance to attack its abysmally high levels of inequality, it is because the current government believes that land reform in that part of the world is a couple of centuries overdue and the right thing to do. That in itself is a powerful argument in favour of the institutional organisation of social and economic change.
Regarding argument number three, the world’s poor are poor for many reasons, but certainly not because the US or the other rich countries want it that way. The big car manufacturers would love to motorise the more than 80% of the world’s population that does not own vehicles. Ask the tobacco companies which markets they look to for growth. And imagine the fat returns of a continent-wide roll-out of prepaid cellphones in Africa if only its people could afford it. It is true that a garment exporter from Bangladesh faces much higher tariffs in the US than her United Kingdom counterpart. But that is because, unlike the British-produced Burberry raincoat made for a few upper-class New Yorkers, her products hurt uncompetitive US garment producers in the Carolinas, where Senators Helms and Thurmond long ago sold their souls to the devil to get any protectionist deal from the White House they wanted. The same is true in Europe which is why it would be a good idea for the European Social Forum to take on the power of the large farmers and agro-industries that dominate agricultural ministries in the European Union.
Consider argument number two. Wayward poor countries with anything to show for themselves, argues Roy, become military targets. Would that be Russia, for changing the rules regarding foreign (and domestic) investors according to how the wind blows? Or China, for perfecting the art of mass counterfeit and patent infringement of American products? Or Argentina, the world’s most unsuccessful economy (and not, as she claims, the neo-liberal poster boy), for losing the US taxpayer lots of money every time the boys from the International Monetary Fund engineer yet another bail-out for Western commercial banks and a local elite of crooks? Or Central America, for refusing to convince its citizens that home-is-where-my-heart-is and allowing them to bugger off illegally to make money in the California grape harvest? Hardly so. Perhaps Roy thinks of Serbia or Afghanistan instead. But what happened in a mad country and in a non-country doesn’t tell us much about what goes on in the world at large.
What about argument number one, the US-European axis of evil and the US’s unlimited power? A casual perusal of European publications devoted to international affairs reveals a profound unease with US policy over the past years. It’s not just that European politicians dislike being called wimps by their counterparts in Washington. The brighter Europeans know that the arrogant unilateralism of the Bush administration is but the extreme expression of a more widely felt recognition within the US establishment, Democrats included, that Europe matters less to US interests than it did in the past. This applies to hawks over Iraq such as Poland or Denmark as well as to the French and the Germans. Hence Europe never signed up to what Roy terms the Neo-Imperialist Project for the New American Century.
The World Trade Organisation, much maligned by both the anti-globalisation movement and the neo-conservatives in the US establishment, made it possible for West African cotton producers to think about taking the US to court over its cotton subsidy programme. This does not make the world a better place. But as long as a midget like Cameroon can raise a stink in a multilateral forum and get away with it, ”complete, unipolar, economic … hegemony” eludes even the mightiest.
Where does that leave those who believe that ”another world is possible”? Agreeing that current (and, unfortunately, perhaps future) US unilateralism does the world no good, is the easy part. The harder part is not to lose sight of the trees in the wood and to make sense of the conflicting interests that describe the current state of affairs. As Abraham Maslow said, ”if the only tool that you have is a hammer, everything begins to look like a nail”. A hegemonic neo-imperialist project that pits rich against poor and governments against people exists only in the imagination of those who want to see it. The real global economy has fault lines. Detecting them is the first step toward effective political programmes aimed at bringing the ”other world” a little closer. This includes identifying governments with whom global social movements can have a critical dialogue, much as they did from the launch of the current round of world trade negotiations in Doha in late 2001 to its unceremonious interruption in Cancun two years later. It was the political credibility emerging from this dialogue that ensured that developing countries would not get pulled over the table yet again. Ultimately it means accepting political responsibility for pushing social and economic change through national and international institutions when the opportunity arises.
Hence finally and thankfully, and with all due respect, at war we are not.
Imraan Valodia is from the School of Development Studies at the University of KwaZulu-Natal and Jo Lorentzen is from the Copenhagen Business School