Mason turbulent empires; a history of global capitalism since 1945 (2018)

TURBULENT EMPIRES TURBULENT EMPIRES A History of Global Capitalism since 1945 MIKE MASON McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago © McGill-Queen’s University Press 2018 ISBN 978-0-7735-5321-7 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-7735-5435-1 (ePDF) ISBN 978-0-7735-5436-8 (ePUB) Legal deposit second quarter 2018 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien L’an dernier, le Conseil a investi 153 millions de dollars pour mettre de l’art dans la vie des Canadiennes et des Canadiens de tout le pays Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Mason, Mike, 1938–, author Turbulent empires : a history of global capitalism since 1945 / Mike Mason Includes bibliographical references and index Issued in print and electronic formats ISBN 978-0-7735-5321-7 (cloth) – ISBN 978-0-7735-5435-1 (ePDF) – ISBN 978-0-7735-5436-8 (ePUB) Capitalism – History – 20th century Capitalism – History – 21st century History, Modern – 20th century History, Modern – 21st century Imperialism I Title HB501.M52 2018 330.12'20904 This book was typeset by True to Type in 10.5/13 Sabon C2017-907846-1 C2017-907847-X Contents Acknowledgments Preface: On with the Show The American Leviathan European Uncertainties Russian Alternatives East Asian Geese Chinese Transformations South Asian Avatars: India and Pakistan Middle East Islamisms African Dark Days Latin America: Populism, Dictatorship, and the Super-cycle Afterword: Reversal of Fortunes Appendix: Statistical Data Notes Bibliography Index Acknowledgments Due to my faulty memory, not all of those to whom I am indebted for ideas and interpretations am I able to acknowledge But of those whose influence has remained indelible even over fifty years, I would like to remember those who taught me at UBC: Ronald Dore, Ping-ti Ho, and James Shirley in Asian studies; Fredrick Soward, John Norris, and Alf Cooke in history; and Stanley Z Pech and Tadeusz Halpert Scanderbeg in Slavonic studies Wayne Suttles introduced me to anthropology, a subject I subsequently studied at the University of Birmingham with R.E Bradbury Among my colleagues and friends at universities in Canada, Britain, and Nigeria, I recall with great relish Robin Porter, sometime mandarin at the British embassy in Beijing, with whom I shared an early, and likely unjustified, enthusiasm for revolutionary China, and Emily Hill who supported me in more ways than one at Queen’s David Parker, also at Queen’s, guided me in Latin American history Much of my limited grasp of Indian history I owe to John Hill, who supplied me with inexpensive texts bought in India, Depunkar Gupta of JNU, and to Paritosh Kumar of Queen’s who has tried to keep me up to date on Indian politics and Bollywood movies Keith Meadowcroft was my first dragoman in India and Anthony Harris introduced me to further readings in development The expansion of my interest in the Middle East and Maghreb I owe to having taught mainly Muslim students in secondary school and university in Nigeria At the Centre of West African Studies of the University of Birmingham I wrote a thesis on a nineteenth-century Muslim emirate in what is today Nigeria At Ahmadu Bello University, where I was a Commonwealth scholar and then a lecturer, I was encouraged to think of the African Sahel and Sudan regions not so much as parts of a generalized and ethnicized Africa, as is conventional, but as a regions within the wide and cosmopolitan dar al-islam The Nigerians and others with whom I studied West African history are too numerous to mention although I would like to recall especially the late John Lavers of Kano, Murray Last, latterly editor of Africa, and ’Remi Adeleye my host in Ibadan Bill Freund, latterly of Durban, who seems to have read almost everything of interest to me, has helped keep me up to speed over the years My enthusiasm for the rich arts of Nigeria I owe to Michael Cardew who introduced me to Kenneth Murray of the Lagos Museum and to Bernard Fagg of the Nigerian Department of Antiquities and later of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford John Picton at the School of Oriental and African Studies has sustained my interest in African arts over several decades and Kent Benson, has reminded me of an African aesthetic that both of us have discussed for half a century Of my Canadian colleagues in the field of African studies, several stand out for their sustaining support; Linda Freeman, Myron Echenberg, Bob Shenton, Dan O’Meara, Bruce Berman, and Barry Riddell To the anonymous readers for McGill-Queen’s University Press, my thanks for a meticulous job and especially for encouraging comments I would like to acknowledge and thank the three editors who have guided this book from submission to completion: Jacqueline Mason, Kathleen Kearns, and Shelagh Plunkett None of the above is responsible in any way for the omissions and travesties in the story that follows This book is for Mary with love and a most particular gratitude and for Amina, Hannah, and Sam who may discover whether I have been right or wrong PREFACE On with the Show Even if the crises that are looming up are overcome and a new run of prosperity lies ahead, deeper problems will still remain Modern capitalism has no purpose except to keep the show going.1 Joan Robinson But never forget that what it’s really about is top-down class warfare That may sound simplistic, but it’s the way the world works.2 Paul Krugman This study deals with the recent origins of the globalized world that we inhabit It is a coda to Eric Hobsbawm’s Age of Extremes (1994), an unmatched history of the “short twentieth century” that began with the outbreak of the Great War and ended with the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the abandonment of communism throughout most of the world.3 Adding a quarter century of recent history to Hobsbawm’s “view into obscurity” has led me to shift my focus away from Europe towards Asia It is here, and especially in China, that we shall very probably witness the most dramatic events of the twenty-first century Eurocentrism is thus likely to be a costly vice Likewise America Firstism The present study was originally to be called When the Music Stopped, but as time went by, and the band struck up again, that seemed inappropriately pessimistic So as the banks were recapitalized, the market revived, the colossal Chinese economy boomed, the show went on, and the title was changed The present title has been adopted to recognize not only the crisis of 2008 but all those crises, national and international, that have been the corollaries of the expansion and consolidation of post-war global capitalism, the seventy years that we might call, so far at least, “the short American century.” This process of expansion in earlier times had been dubbed “free-trade imperialism,” but now we give it a more tender description, “globalization.” As I compose this preface in the aftermath of the “Brexit” vote of 23 June 2016, however, this globalization that engendered novel blocs of political and economic influence seems to have lost some of its mojo Capitalism is by nature turbulent and destructive; its episodic shifts have inevitably been marked by convolutions and even revolutions We see this in the decades after 1945, years that still bore the scars of the wartime violence that had been manifest from one end of Eurasia to the other – civil wars, wars of imperial and neo-imperial contraction and expansion, of ethnic cleansing, and of massive human displacement and suffering with new blocs coalesced, older states stripped of territories, new dictatorships emergent, revolutions and counterrevolutions raging, and economies variously collapsing and vaulting Guiding and structuring this change for several decades in the postwar era, in both the capitalist world and the communist bloc, planning reigned Keynesianism and, to a large extent, import substitution industrialization (ISI) ruled in the world of capitalism Then, slowly from the 1970s, neoliberalism and its prescriptions like the Washington Consensus, elbowed their way into credibility among politicians and professors From circa 1990, with the demolition of the Berlin Wall, came a different set of convulsions, still evident in the Ukraine and the eastern realms of the EU To make my point about the turbulence of postwar capitalism, I have shifted my gaze from a single focus, let us say “American hegemony,” to look at particular states and blocks of states from western Europe east to Japan and south to Latin America In doing this it is possible to see that the ruling elites of states make, or try to make, their own histories, not, of course, under conditions that they might prefer but in the circumstances forced upon them In the process they often shift their ideologies, their politics and their purposes quite radically; think about China, Russia, and Germany, which I discuss, and Vietnam and Cuba which I not Usually inadvertency dominates No one could predict the breakup of the Soviet bloc, the outcome of the end of apartheid, the destruction of Iraq, the stagnation of the economy of Japan, the political crisis of Brazil, or even Brexit To understand a little more that the world is not actually “made in America,” I have sketched the national histories of several states There is nothing new I can say about capitalism nor anything novel about globalization; in different forms both have existed since at least the seventeenth century Contemporary globalization, driven by the economic explosion of postwar America, has appropriated older forms of trade and commerce and affixed them to the new; French bankers still squeeze foreign borrowers, as they did the Egyptians in the nineteenth century, but social media transforms political possibility, as in Syntagma and Tahrir Squares And, like its ancestor, contemporary globalization is both martial and commercial – it requires fleets and armies and huge defence and security expenditure as well as a web of banks and transnational corporations and an electronic net to sustain itself Americandominated financial practices and institutions – the dollar, the IMF, the debt rating services, the Office of Foreign Assets Control – serve to channel the entire system Not to exaggerate globalization, although the American version of English is the world’s Latin in the marketplaces and counting houses, the airports, and at Davos, it will never be the lingua franca of the world’s towns, and at the world’s movies one is just as likely to hear Hindi or Brazilian Portuguese The overarching, ubiquitous, postwar imperial centre is still America The practice that America engages in economically, militarily, and culturally to assure its dominance is called “hegemony,” a relatively contemporary word revived and popularized, as I note in chapter 1, in the 1970s Often American writers call hegemony by the bashful term “leadership,” but the two refer to a similar practice With the dissolution of the Soviet empire circa 1990 it appeared that hegemonic competition had ceased to exist; the “bipolar” world was toast So for a brief, giddy, moment at the end of the twentieth century it looked like history had run out of road and we were now safely in McDonald’s parking lot Then, a convulsion To the shock and horror of the world, 9/11 proved that the “end of history” view was premature Then came a second convulsion, the crash of 2008 and within the following years a growing popular reaction to the assumptions and inequalities of the boom and bubble years Among these reactions was the Brexit of June 2016 and the election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the US In sum, in the snapshots that follow I hope to consider several national developmental histories, most of which have shown themselves to be remarkable and all of which are distinctive Yet, globally, America remains as the hegemon The slogan “Bring America Back” is therefore otiose; America never went anywhere to come back from Meanwhile, we are turning the pages of the American century and, to quote Joan Robinson, the show still goes on I started reading contemporary history in the autumn of 1956; my first undergraduate months coincided with the Suez crisis and the Hungarian Revolution I launched the present essay just before Christmas 2011, in a week after the spokesman for the Canadian government said that we would be leaving the Kyoto agreement (12 December), Britain refused to accept changes to the EU constitution (16 December), and the last military convoy drove out of Iraq to Kuwait (17 December) On Thursday of the same week the Anglo-American essayist and polemicist Christopher Hitchens died and on Saturday, the Czech playwright and politician, Vaclav Havel The Dow Jones Industrial Average exhibited skittishness, and Canadian government ten-year bonds sold at 1.862 per cent Rich Greeks continued to flee their country, the West’s most ancient, with suitcases full of euros – on average €4 to billion a month In China, the Guangdong village of Wukan remained besieged by police after a land dispute that led to the murder of one of the protests’ leaders Clashes continued on the streets of Cairo; the Arab Spring had morphed into a winter of discontent On 25 December, St Theresa’s Catholic Church in Jos State, Nigeria, was destroyed by a suicide bomber associated with a previously little known jihadi group called Boko Haram In many quarters there was worry; it seemed that not only was the Muslim world once more in ferment but that several of the West’s most favoured Arab tyrants were heading for Ozymandian fates There was really little room for optimism about global economic recovery, either, although the pages of the financial press managed to turn out opinions by otherwise unknown fund managers who for the most part were bullish There was always wealth to be increased for the prudent investor, they said reassuringly It went without saying that this wealth might have to be managed and stored “offshore” – a word, like “privatization” in an earlier decade, that suddenly became common right across the capitalist world “Inequality,” the word and the concern, was on the rise in the media but, presumably, little mentioned in corporate dining rooms Yet, only a year earlier a successor to Joan Robinson at Cambridge, the economist Ha-Joon Chang, had commented: “The global economy lies in tatters” and in October 2013, Nouriel Roubini of New York University, known as “Dr Doom” for his prediction of the 2007–08 meltdown, claimed “this ‘recovery’ feels temporary.” “We now live in an unambiguous age of crisis” announced the British political scientist and philosopher, David Runciman, in the same year And at the time of the Greek crisis in mid-2015, Paul Krugman, an eminent Euro- and Sinopessimist, wrote despairingly of “Europe’s Impossible Dream.” Still the light of hope shone in the eyes of some By mid-September 2015, “Dr Doom” had stunned his listeners with his change of heart Others joined in the rising chorus of optimism “Doomsday predictions of the Anglo-American media notwithstanding,” wrote Konrad H Jarausch, the historian of Germany, “the ghosts of Europe’s bloody past are not returning and repeating previous catastrophes.”5 ... Central Asia and the seas of Japan This included a contingent of ten roaming aircraft carrier groups churning back and forth across the Pacific and Indian Oceans and adjacent seas The US navy actually... Preface: On with the Show The American Leviathan European Uncertainties Russian Alternatives East Asian Geese Chinese Transformations South Asian Avatars: India and Pakistan Middle East Islamisms... Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Mason, Mike, 1938–, author Turbulent empires : a history of global capitalism since 1945 / Mike Mason Includes bibliographical references and index