Re: The new imperialism

these guys have been up late watching adam curtis docs.

Le mer. 17 avr. 2019 à 19:11, DANIEL P. Tompkins <[email protected]> a
écrit :

> Below I'm providing excerpts from  Henry Farrell and Abraham
> Newman's just-out essay in *The National Interest *on the dangers of modern
> imperialism. I'm sending to classicists partly because it opens with a
> comparison with ancient imperialism that may make the essay inviting for
> classroom use.
>
> These guys are smart. They're summing up a lot, and careful review will be
> necessary.  But they succinctly portray a new world, in which nations are
> increasingly "interdependent" (crucial word for ancient economic
> historians), to such a point that national security is more at risk than
> had been imagined.  So, possibly of interest. Comments welcome.
>
> Dan
>
> America’s Misuse of Its Financial Infrastructure
>
> https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fnationalinterest.org%2Ffeature%2Famerica%25E2%2580%2599s-misuse-its-financial-infrastructure-52707&amp;data=02%7C01%7CCLASSICS-L%40lsv.uky.edu%7C92c882ac2adf450c468d08d6c64af2cb%7C2b30530b69b64457b818481cb53d42ae%7C0%7C0%7C636914422538362760&amp;sdata=khmuInQvQbU3MtJz76HdVRcYtfIHcRlirbaKzNalkEo%3D&amp;reserved=0
>
> Henry Farrell
> Abraham Newman
>
> April 2019
>
>
> THREE DECADES ago, a German history professor listed 210 proposed
> explanations for the fall of the Roman Empire. The remarkable array
> included such fanciful causes as Bolshevism, public baths, hedonism, the
> pressure of terrorism and, most famously, lead poisoning.
>
> The last explanation has been discredited. It is highly unlikely that lead
> water pipes caused the empire to collapse … [But] exploded theories can
> point towards important truths. Like classical Rome, *America’s empire
> today depends less on pomp than on plumbing*. Instead of roads, aqueducts
> and seaports, it relies on pipelines conveying financial flows and torrents
> of data, as well as vast distributed supply chains. These look like a
> global public infrastructure, but can readily be redirected to private
> national strategic advantage. America’s domination of obscure, seeming
> technical structures is generating its own forms of hubristic folly among
> imperial administrators, who have begun to think that there is nothing they
> cannot do with it.
>
> TO CHART the empires of antiquity you simply mapped the cities, rivers and
> roads through which power flowed. Today’s international economy has a far
> more complex topography that encompasses both the physical and the digital
> [with] an intricate global tangle of conduits. These started to coalesce
> into their current configuration a quarter of a century ago, at a moment
> when the world economy appeared to be secure from empire’s grasp.
> The early 1990s seemed the beginning of a new and simpler world where the
> law of kings had been displaced by the lex mercatoria. … it appeared that
> bitter international disputes over the ordering of the economy were giving
> way to the complete victory of the free market. … Quinn Slobodian describes
> how *neoliberals had long desired the victory of “dominium”—a global order
> based on property rights, free global and national exchange—over
> “imperium”*—the
> power of national states to control property, block financial flows, and
> harness markets for strategic ends. In the 1990s, it appeared that
> *imperium
> was being beaten back inside the bounds of national borders. …*
>
> In this new era, businesses not only sought to grow and bestride the world,
> but to remake it in their own image. The great banks and financial
> corporations aggressively built international capital markets….
> This new world, like its self-appointed prophet Thomas Friedman, described
> itself through a garble of metaphors for flatness, openness and
> all-conquering market forces. *U.S. policymakers believed that illiberal
> states could be tamed by free information and economic openness*, welcoming
> China into the World Trade Organization….
>
> These vast new flows of money, information and manufacturing components
> required the construction of a correspondingly vast infrastructure…. These
> infrastructural systems at first appeared to be technical, dull and
> apolitical…. This new order  [b]y *mapping and organizing the world for
> business, however, ... accidentally made it more vulnerable to state
> power.*
>
> … Global supply chains, pursuing Adam Smith’s economic logic of
> specialization, often relied on a tiny number of key suppliers for crucial
> and difficult to manufacture components, so that a fire in a single factory
> could bring entire industries to a near standstill.
>
> *This did not just transform economies; it transformed international*
> * security. *
>
> … America’s secret empire—its power over the global infrastructures that
> support flows of finance, information and components—could only be
> maintained so long as it was not overused. *Unilateral actions that
> threaten the interests of other powerful states will lead them to react.
> *Some
> will respond, as China did, through self-help; building their own surplus
> capacities to strengthen themselves against foreign manipulation. Russia is
> building up reserves in gold and yuan as barricades against further
> international financial coercion. Others, like the EU, may not be hunkering
> down but building out.
> …
> the United States itself will withdraw from some aspects of global
> interdependence as it realizes how communal plumbing endangers its own
> security. [Note] the recent alarm over the Chinese communications firm
> Huawei
> …
> These pressures and counter-pressures are only going to get worse. The
> United States, its allies and its major adversaries are beginning to
> confront a very difficult truth.* The backbone networks of the modern
> globalized economy have become major national security issues. *
>