The stories we tell shape the future as well as the past. They are a way of making sense of being and time. This is true from the most intimate to the grandest political and historical level. Some of the story lines people use are very old. Not all are suited to the task to which they are put.
Globalisation is an abstract noun but it describes real phenomena. Where is its future? The stories told about it are part of what will determine that future, and are highly contested charged with heightened emotion in times of large-scale violence.
So, for example, writing for openDemocracy, Adonis, the man widely regarded as the Arab worlds greatest living poet, makes two points. First:
The removal of Saddam Husseins regime is a human necessity. Its existence does more than merely degrade the humanity of the Iraqi people. It represents the degradation of humankind in its very humanity.
But, second, war a bestial means to an end exploited by all the tyrants of history, which, moving beneath the slogans of humanity, brings only destruction cannot be the way.
The trouble is, Adoniss principled belief looks likely to be confronted with a new reality the removal of Saddams regime by war. According to openDemocracys international security correspondent Paul Rogers, the fighting will begin in late March.
Here, then, are three fundamental drivers for world views, or at least important elements of them: the reality of an entrenched, intolerable evil; war as the greatest atrocity; and the sense that war is inexorable. What effect will a major, world-historical chain of events have on how people think about globalisation? Globolog does not have an answer, of course, but offers here a sketch map of some (by no means all) of the territory where the future is being imagined.
Narratives of globalisation
Heres one summary of the contested terrain:
One reason for the general confusion is that people have started to use the word globalisation as shorthand for their entire philosophy of life. For high-flyers in Wall Street and Silicon Valley, it is a synonym for modernity; for French intellectuals (as for bin Laden), it means American domination; for Ralph Nader and Pat Buchanan, it means exactly the opposite: the emasculation of their country.
That interpretation appears in a recent essay by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, two writers for The Economist magazine. Micklethwaite and Wooldridge are revisiting the territory of their ultra-optimistic book about globalisation published in 2000, and ask what difference the trends made manifest on 11 September 2001 have made.
They believe that globalisation the ever-freer movement of goods, services, ideas and people around the world is a fundamental good, rooted in freedom. The biggest question about 11 September, they say, is the Sarajevo one: was the attack on the World Trade Center one of historys turning points? Are we witnessing the end of a process of global integration that has been gathering pace for decades?
Not at all, they conclude. By most measures, they think, Islamic fundamentalism is the weakest of all threats that globalisation has yet faced. Socialism, by contrast, combined a searing analysis of contemporary injustices with a compelling promise of a better future. Islamism, say Micklethwait and Wooldridge, has none of socialisms coherence. But globalisations continuing success depends on the willingness of the United States to stamp out terrorism and the grievances that underpin it:
That war involves not just stepping up covert operations against [al-Qaida] and disposing of Saddam Hussein, but also doing more to prevent nuclear proliferation and resuming the search for peace in the Middle East.
Here, then, is a classic exposition of what Tom Nairn, in his extraordinary, far-ranging essays for openDemocracy, sees as a version of globalisation led above all by neo-liberal elements in the United States who seek to use war to regain control. Their objective, says Nairn, is to recapture globalisation, and confine it within the ultra-capitalist straitjacket of its own beginnings.
For Nairn, the elated, planetary exploitation of the triumph of 1989 [by these -elements] was unforgivable enough Now the right deserves to fail in its global coup détat, finally and completely. The alternative, he thinks, is a new civic, democratic nationalism pioneered in countries like Brazil.
Does Micklethwait and Wooldridges or Nairns story-line offer a more useful mental map of the likely future? Are both flawed? The events in the next few months may provide concrete answers.
back to topThe hawks story
For those in the US with power, war or at least the threat to use overwhelming force very clearly is the way forward. Key shapers of US foreign policy such as Paul Wolfowitz have been dubbed Wilsonians of the Right (see Joseph Nye in Globolog). The declared position is that democracy can be made to work in the Arab world. Its a question of creating a situation that favours those who have interests in promoting greater freedom.
But theres a more immediate reason for military action. Douglas Feith, under-secretary for defence policy (Wolfowitzs old job in the administration of Bush the First), put it this way to Nicholas Lemann in an interview for The New Yorker (17 & 24 February):
One of the principal thoughts underlying our strategy in the war on terrorism is the importance of the connection between terrorist organizations and their state sponsors. Terrorist organizations cannot be effective in sustaining themselves over long periods of time to do large-scale operations if they dont have support from states and one of the principal reasons that we are focussed on Iraq as a threat to us is because we are focussed on this connection between three things: terrorist organizations, state sponsors, and weapons of mass destruction. If we were to take military action and vindicate our principals, in the war on terrorism, against Iraq, I think it would register with other countries round the world that are sponsoring terrorism.
Cheerleaders for this approach include the President himself and the likes of Max Boot, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations (truly a latter day Boot of the Beast : no feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole for this Boot). Boot and people like him frame US action in the narrative of a benign imperium, for which the image is Britain in the early 19th century applying force to suppress the international slave trade.
For the Boots, the United Nations an organisation whose human rights commission is chaired by Libya and disarmament body by Iraq is largely an irrelevance. Americas destiny is to police the world.
Ooo, you're my hero, Mr Boot!
The Likud paradigm
Lemanns article reports a continuity between the policy of the Bush administration and the long-term strategy of Israels Likud government specifically a paper called A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm. This was written in 1996 by advisors led by Richard Perle to Binyamin Netanyahu, then newly-elected Prime Minister. The paper recommends that the Israeli government abandon the Oslo peace accords negotiated in 1993 and reject the basis for them the idea of trading land for peace. Israel should insist on Arab recognition of its claim to the biblical land of Israel, the 1996 report suggested, and should focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq.
Ariel Sharon has since succeeded Binyamin Netanyahu as Israeli prime minister, of course, but what the Washington Post (9 February 2003) dubs a nearly identical middle east policy of Bush and Sharon has emerged clearly.
Where does this story line tend? In a letter written shortly before his death in 1904, Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism, warned: Macht keine Dummheiten während ich tot bin (Dont make any stupid mistakes when Im dead). By and large, as Tom Segev documents in his brilliant One Palestine Complete Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate, his successors were extremely astute. The Zionists had a breathtakingly ambitious vision, and usually proved adept at handling the great power of the day Britain to their ends. The country they built is an amazing success.
Commentators like Amos Elon argue that Israels present difficulties largely originate with the triumph of the war of 1967. The country began to over-reach itself and embarked down a road of endless conflict. An important force, it is argued, is the religious element in politics and society, which wants Israeli control of the biblical lands of Judea and Samaria.
Many formative figures of the State of Israel were not particularly religious. Chaim Weizmann, for example, showed more affiliation to the values of the European enlightenment than to traditional pieties when the first institution he pushed for in Palestine was a university (1918), arguing that a Jewish state without a university would be like Monaco without a casino.
But religious narratives in Israeli politics have grown in strength. They are not unchallenged, of course. Sharons new government, for example, is a strange coalition with both the stridently secular Shinui and the National Religious Party. Nevertheless, A Clean Break would fulfil a religious prophecy (see Numbers, Chapter 33 verse 53: Ye shall dispossess the inhabitants of the land, and dwell therein: for I have given you the land to possess it) that resonates strongly with powerful constituencies in both the US and Israel.
Elliott Abrams, director of Middle Eastern affairs at the White House and therefore top US policy-maker for the region, has an explicitly religious view of politics. From his time in the 1980s as a Reagan administration specialist on Central America, he also knows something about the measures that can be taken to deal with insurgency. For Abrams, religious concerns and strategic decisions are likely to sit comfortably together.
Some Israelis commentators, such as Yossi Alpher (former director of the Jaffee Centre for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University and co-editor of the Israeli-Palestinian internet-based dialogue bitterlemons.org) and Avi Shlaim (professor of international relations at Oxford University) say a war on Iraq carries enormous dangers for Israel. Others believe that sufficient determination will yield huge opportunities (the potential of Iraqs rivers has not passed without notice). It remains to be seen how the stories people tell in the long and powerful narrative of the Jewish people shape events and are affected by them.
back to topThe oil account
Energy resources are at the heart of the world economy. The Promethean story of industrialisation has never been better summed up than by James Watt: I have that which all men seek power. James Watts inventions to harness energy, such as the rotary-motion steam engine in 1781 (together with developments by Trevithick and others), were central to the first great era of globalisation, allowing the industrial powers of the 19th century to bring overwhelming force to bear wherever and whenever they chose. Today, oil is the single most important energy resource.
The story line that says oil is a key factor in war on Iraq (a view shared by Globolog) has been challenged repeatedly. Sceptics argue that war for oil makes no economic sense. Cheaper by far to keep buying the oil from Saddam (the US has been Iraqs largest customer for the last dozen years or more). If we were really concerned about cheap oil above all, wed be sending troops to Caracas, not Baghdad says our friend Boot.
Projections of the costs of a war first noted in Globolog last November are indeed enormous. And, writing in the Financial Times on 13 February, the former head of country research at UBS in Zurich, John Tatom, calculates that even if the US took all Iraqi oil revenue (an unlikely scenario given the need to keep the country afloat) this would only increase the income of the average US citizen by $100 dollars a year, a comparatively trivial sum for most Americans. Even the value of Iraqi total reserves would be less on a per capita basis for the average American family than the 2001 Bush tax rebate.
This argument is so full of holes as hardly to be worth countering. It confuses supposed benefits averaged across the US population as a whole with the tangible outcomes that would accrue to a relatively small group of powerful players. It also ignores strategic concerns. Chris Weafer, chief strategist at Alfa Bank in Moscow, points out that as global demand rises and supply becomes tighter, oil is much more likely to become a political weapon [according to the International Energy Agency, demand growth in the five years 2000-2005 will be 6m barrels per day an 8.3% rise. By the end of this decade, world demand will be in the region of 89m b/d from roughly 77m b/d this year]. A friendly Iraq, with the worlds second largest reserves, is needed as a guarantor of supply and price if Saudi becomes unstable.
The US wants to avoid a repetition of the oil crisis of 1973 when Arab states cut off oil supply. As James Akin, the former US ambassador to Saudi Arabia, said on BBC Television on 23 February. With control of Iraq, we will be the new OPEC.
Last week Daniel Yergin, author of The Prize: the epic quest for oil, money and power put it this way:
Iraq needs to be seen as a part of an emerging contest between Russia and the Caspian on one side and the Middle East on the other side as to who will add more capacity to meet the worlds growing demand.
War or no war, the drive to increase Iraqi production over the next five to ten years will be intense. The ground has already been well prepared. Thierry Desmarest, head of TotalFinaElf (TFE), the worlds fourth largest oil group (who on 20 February said war is inevitable) has been careful to insist that no company in the TFE group had signed contracts with the Baghdad regime.
TFE has looked extensively at the concessions to exploit two big fields at Majnoun and Nahr ibn Oummar, capable of producing a million barrels per day. When it became clear that signature of a contract would break the UN embargo, says Thierry Desmarest, formal talks broke off and the Iraqis turned to the Russians instead. Nevertheless, he continues, contacts built up by his company with Iraqi officials and technicians since the first Gulf war, combined with technical studies of the proposed concessions and up to date data on the countries oil resources, give his group a head start over potential rivals. He sees no reason why TFE should suffer any discrimination after a US-led regime change in Iraq: Its a dollar company.
The drive by TFE and others to get a share of the massive rebuild and expansion contracts for Iraqs oil fields looks likes being one of the most predictable stories over the next decade or so. If it runs into problems (will, for example, those Iraqi contacts cultivated by TFE all be dead?) the difficulties of the world economy could significantly increase.
Rapid expansion in the burning of fossil fuels plays an important role in another story for the 21st century: the one that says humans are changing the climate. Globolog notes recent criticisms of the IPCCs scenarios for the coming decades (noting that these are criticisms of projections of economic growth, not climate science) and will return to this story another time.
A brother's journey from pink Cadillac to WahhabismThe freedom fighters tale
Al-Qaida and groups like it see themselves as freedom fighters. The wider world has recently been reminded of the rationale by a message from bin Laden:
One of the most important objectives of this latest crusade is to establish a huge Jewish superstate (Greater Israel) that will include the whole of Palestine, parts of Iraq, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and a huge area from the land of the two holy sanctuaries.
Bin Laden may be wildly exaggerating the extent of territory that Israeli hardliners wish to occupy. But for his purposes the truth doesnt matter so long as the story he depicts is sufficiently compelling:
What is happening in Palestine is a small sample of what will take place in the region: the killing of men, women and children; imprisonment, terrorism and the destruction of houses; the pillaging of the land and razing of factories; and putting the people into a perpetual state of fear, where they can expect death at any time from a rocket or shell destroying their houses and killing their womenfolk.
Every baby accidentally shot or grandmother inadvertently bulldozed in her house in Gaza or the West Bank will be used by bin Laden and his supporters as evidence for this world view. Avishai Margalit is surely right when he identifies revenge rather than, say, payments from Saddam as the prime motivation for Palestinian suicide bombers:
Mahmoud Ahmed Marmash, a twenty-one-year-old bachelor from Tulkarm, blew himself up in Netanya, near Tel Aviv, in May 2001. On a videocassette recorded before he was sent on his mission, he said: I want to avenge the blood of the Palestinians, especially the blood of the women, of the elderly, and of the children, and in particular the blood of the baby girl Iman Hejjo, whose death shook me to the core.....
And bin Laden, whose own life narrative is influenced by a virulent strain of the doctrine of Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab and syncopated by a passing brush with Western culture, recognises the power of revenge. If he can sufficiently generalise the outrage through telling the right stories, he is on to a winner.
The peaceniks gospel
The recent worldwide protests against war are virtually unprecedented in scale, and show the strength of feeling against US and British military action in Iraq.
Reasons for opposition to war are various. They include prudential caution (it would be nice to remove Saddam, but it will cause more problems than it solves) and idealistic pacifism (violence is always wrong and unjust")
Many protestors think a war which hurts and kills many civilians can never be justified. Whoever has not felt this at some point is surely deficient in essential human qualities. The case is eloquently put in a speech by Julian Bond published for the first time on openDemocracy.
And Jonathon Glover, Director of the Centre for Medical Law and Ethics at Kings College London, and author of Humanity: a moral history of the 2oth century, makes an especially poignant contrast. He points to the terrible difficulties facing doctors and nurses in life-or-death decisions for a single child in a hospital: It is hard not to be struck by the contrast between these painful deliberations and the hasty way people think about a war in which thousands [of children] will be killed.
Describing the London protestors of 15 February for openDemocracy, Rosemary Bechler writes: They have peered over the brink and contemplated a world in which even as a last resort massive superior force may not always be effective. It is a fearful thought. It is a very new thought.
Actually, it is not a terribly new thought. It is the message of Buddha and Jesus, among others. More recently, in 1928 recognising the pointlessness and the pity of war in the aftermath of the first world war the United States and more than a dozen other major nations signed (and ratified) a pact renouncing war as an instrument of national policy.
Before the second world war, twelve million people in Britain, more than a quarter of the population, signed a peace pledge. The equivalent proportion today would be more than sixteen million, or eight to sixteen times as many as marched on 15 February.
In 1945 Niels Bohr said we are in a completely new situation that cannot be resolved by war. At its founding, the United Nations pledged to save successive generations from the scourge of war. In 1947 Albert Einstein said: this basic power of the universe [nuclear weapons] cannot be fitted into the outdated concept of narrow nationalisms. For there is no secret and there is no defence; there is no possibility of control except through the aroused understanding and insistence of the peoples of the world.
As somebody once said in another context, everything changes, except the avant garde.
Something that does change, but more slowly than actual events, are the scenarios people use to imagine future wars. One reason for this may be that many atrocities of the 20th century can be so transfixing that it is hard not to dwell on them and apply them to future situations.
So, when in late January 2003 the Pentagon talked about Shock and Awe as the aim of a massive, 800-strong cruise missile strike in the first two days of an Iraqi campaign, popular imaginings turned to Hamburg, Dresden and Hiroshima.
But a variance between these scenarios and the likely war-fighting realities should be noted. As the Nato attack on Serbia clearly showed, cruise missiles are accurate weapons which hit their targets without damaging surrounding structures. Sometimes, of course, the wrong targets are identified such as, whoops, the Chinese embassy.
Now it may be that the Iraqi military will corral unwilling civilians into locations they believe will be key American targets in order to maximise propaganda yield. But to draw an analogy with, say, the Hamburg firestorm which was generalised over an entire city is surely mistaken. As the US Department of Defence Command and Control Research Program makes clear, Shock and Awe can take many forms short of wholesale incineration.
The effects of bunker buster nuclear weapons would in no way resemble Hiroshima or Nagasaki. And it is unlikely in the extreme that the Americans would use a large air burst nuclear weapon on a major population centre.
War may escalate - and casualties increase - in various ways, but it doesn't help to plan for events by substituting old storylines for thought. Particular attention should be given to the evolving scenarios of humanitarian disaster which are being explored on openDemocracy by Gil Loescher and Arthur Helton.
Never again. Again
Mercutios curse
For some who do not look kindly on the US administration, the peaceniks arguments are not enough either: a post-Saddam, sanctions-free Iraq would mean far fewer children dying than do at present and, they argue, this will never come without war.
There is a set of stories whose tellers have not completely made up their minds or who are compelled by contradictory thoughts. This is the zone of ambivalence and difficulty. Sometimes it sounds like Mercutios curse a plague on both your houses, as the one making the narrative turns his or her anger on both Iraq and the US.
Some in this camp believe they are less deceived in their understanding of the realities of power than the peaceniks. It is a vision summed up in the words attributed by the ancient Greek historian Thucydides to the Athenian delegation to Melos in the sixteenth year of the Peloponnesian War (approximately 431 BCE): You know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.
Under this broad (and slightly misleading) rubric of Mercutios curse, Globolog also puts many Iraqi exiles such as Kanan Makiya and their non-Iraqi supporters such as Nick Cohen. This group believe that some good can come out of war, but see betrayal by the Left (for example, Harold Pinter denying the aspiration of the Kurds for freedom) and fear it from the Right (forces in the US administration that have no time for democracy in a post-Saddam Iraq).
Writing for openDemocracy, one of Englands best novelists Ian McEwan, and one of its most astute writers on politics Timothy Garton Ash are also not a million miles from here.
But it should be stressed that by no means all Iraqis are in this camp or anywhere near it. Many free Iraqis are unambiguously opposed to war. They include Kamil Mahdi, who thinks an American attack on Iraq would bring disaster, not liberation.
By contrast, Rania Kashi, who condemns past American action but ultimately comes down in favour of an attack, has been a particular focus for attention in recent days. It is a travesty to say that she and people who share her views, such as the East Timorese Nobel Peace Prize winner Jose Ramos-Horta, are useful idiots for Bush-Blair Propaganda.
back to topThe silent ones
A silence surrounds those at the centre of this affair. The Iraqi stories on openDemocracy and elsewhere are those of exiles. From those inside government-controlled Iraq, by contrast, we hear nothing other than scenes from the stories Saddam tells himself.
David Hayes has suggested that we may hear more from the silent ones in future, if we will only listen. Meanwhile, for light relief, Tony Harrison has imagined the voice of a victim in the 1991 Gulf war. From the hundreds of thousands killed by Saddam - orders of magnitude more Muslims than have died at Israeli hands - we will never hear anything
It may be years before we hear the true voices of survivors, undistorted by propaganda or drowned out by accusations that they are propaganda. If and when we do, the tales will include ones like this (from a second world war Belgian resistance fighter tortured by the Gestapo, included by W.G. Sebald in his Natural History of Destruction):
I was raised with the chain until I hung about a metre above the floor. In such a position, or rather, when hanging this way, with your hands behind your back, for a short time you can hold at a half-oblique through muscular force. During these few minutes, when you are already expending your utmost strength, when sweat has already appeared on your forehead and lips, and you are breathing in gasps, you will not answer any questions. Accomplices? Addresses? Meeting places? You hardly hear it. All your life is gathered in a single, limited area of the body, the shoulder joints, and it does not react; for it exhausts itself completely in the expenditure of energy. But this cannot last long, even with people who have a strong physical constitution. As for me, I had to give up rather quickly. And now there was a cracking and splintering in my shoulders that my body has not forgotten to this hour. The balls sprang from their sockets. My own body weight caused [dislocation]; I fell into a void and now hung by my dislocated arms which had been torn high from behind and were now twisted over my head. Torture, from Latin torquere, to twist. What a visual instruction in etymology!
back to topBeyond war
Never make predictions, especially about the future. The wisdom in this quip is made clear by a study of possible casualties in an upcoming war made by Michael OHanlon, a military specialist at the Brookings Institution. OHanlon uses the latest statistical models to forecast US dead at between 100 and 5,000 (500 to 30,000 casualties if you include the wounded). His projection for Iraqi civilian and military casualties has an even wider spread from 1,000 to 100,000 (and much larger numbers of wounded). Nice try, Mike. Dont call us.
One area to watch during and after a war will be the Kurdish autonomous region in northern Iraq. What is said to particularly alarm Turkish military leaders, who would provide a large part of an occupation force, is that the two rival Kurdish factions in this zone have started turning into real political parties. They have opened offices in each others fiefdoms, and are debating and campaigning with civility, relishing freedom in its true sense.
In the US and UK, terrorist incidents would cause alarm and economic disruption but probably quite low rates of death and debility. The lethality of chemical and biological weapons is massively overstated by both government and media. A radiological weapon (dirty bomb) would cause deaths in the hundreds, and could significantly disrupt economic activity. Nuclear attacks would cause more deaths, but even in this case, survival rates outside the immediate blast area would be high. Economies would continue to function.
What lies beyond revolutionary socialism?A new world story
In a brave new world, which would be the authentic stories, worth listening to? Could we still hear them? Well, the human capacity for joy and healing and just plain silliness will be undiminished. Just because some dreams remain impossible does not mean that we will not continue to have them.
Set aside these sentimental comforts. What will be the grand narrative of globalisation?
With or without war but especially with it, there will be even stronger calls for a new kind of globalisation of the kind discussed at the recent World Social Forum in Brazil.
But whats the programme? Is this movement more than the Cheshire Cat of revolutionary socialism [all that] is left when the moralism and passion remain, but the intellect and organisation have gone? (Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf on the writer-activist Naomi Klein and the anti-capitalism movement).
In his essay for openDemocracy, Tom Nairn talks in fairly general terms about new kinds of democratic nationalism. Micklethwait and Wooldridge, by contrast, anticipate some very specific tensions:
Western workers [get] tired of the unrelenting (if productive) pressure that globalisation places on all of us. So far, that pressure has been applied primarily to blue-collar workers, but it is now affecting the professional classes. The fuss about steel imports will be as nothing compared to the furore when lawyers, accountants, and even doctors discover that their work can be outsourced to India.
Are they right? I dont know, but I am attracted by two of the other scenarios they allude to as parts of their solution: Debt forgiveness [of highly indebted poor countries] could be dramatically expanded at relatively little cost to the West Far too little thought has gone into global philanthropy.
Here is Globologs plea for those building new stories. Set aside noodle-headed New Age notions such as Gaia-centrism being more important than social justice. Look hard at the economics (not some travesty of simplification that engenders a quick emotional reaction) and at issues of social justice. Consider, for example, the full implications of massive American trade deficits to Europe, Japan and China (in the last case, it is the motor of the largest industrial transformation in history, and for now at least carries benefits to both parties). Look hard at the complexities in, for example, India. Then, when you tell a story, people will not only listen. They will be able to build on something which has a stability approaching that of truth.
Do you have a story about globalisation? Contact globolog@opendemocracy.net