Multipolarity against the World-State

A Brief Elaboration

Well, I’m back. I figured I wouldn’t do any of these once I was back in school but it looks like I’ve been too damn on top of everything and now have a surfeit of time (and modafinil) on my hands. Another reason I only put out the one piece over this platform is that the ideas in it were floating around in my head and driving me nuts — not that I haven’t been doing plenty of reading and thinking since. No similar lightbulb moment has come over me since, but I have been spending my usual amount of time on Twitter. Adam Tooze has talked eloquently about how Twitter, for as maddening and ridiculous as it is, has prodded and prompted him intellectually and I guess I feel the same way. If your brain is hard enough to turn off, a vacuous attention trap makes the gears whir faster instead of gumming them up.

One thing I’ve seen on there is that an awful lot of people are missing what to me are very obvious aspects of our present conjuncture. I make it a general rule not to use Twitter for serious purposes, and most of my friends don’t either and also think about nerd shit a lot less than I do. Other people I engage with regularly are probably too devoted to flogging the dead horse of Marxism-Leninism to notice the age they’re living in. But if the last thing I wrote was a narrative of “where we are now,” centered on the largest interstate conflict of my lifetime, it is now time to sketch “where we are going.”

One theme I’ve referred to previously is Giovanni Arrighi’s fundamentally Gramscian theory of cycles of political-economic hegemony. It is Gramscian because for Arrighi, hegemony has a specific definition and isn’t just a byword for “strength,” “power,” or “imperialism” on the world stage. All of those are aspects of dominance, that is pure coercive power, which only becomes hegemony when it is combined with moral-political legitimacy (Arrighi, 2009: 150). Gramsci was only really paraphrasing Machiavelli’s maxim that true power involves not just force, but consent. So, in interstate relations in the modern capitalist world-system hegemonic states are not just the strongest militarily. They also have a claim to be acting in the collective interest of the other members of the interstate system, or at least the ability to portray their own interests as synonymous with everyone else’s (Arrighi, 1994: 29-30). The last post on this blog argued that in the context of American hegemony, this claim took the form of a world social compact where most of the planet agreed that Wilsonian self-determination, “development” of poor nations, and Cold War bipolarity were desirable (Wallerstein, 1992: 99-104). Ideological competition was not only not relevant, but indeed all the Cold War ideologies ultimately agreed on fundamental starting priors. The flourishing of Marxism-Leninism and its younger sibling, developmentalism, was not a sign of the system’s weakness but of its strength — because those projects could be accomodated. The crisis of the 1970s forced the United States to sacrifice its own ideological shield and move towards implementing a new global project called neoliberalism (Wallerstein, 2005: 1266-1273) — and thus spelled the end of an identifiable condition of US hegemony.

If the United States no longer enjoyed hegemony after the collapse of its Cold War partner-in-crime, what do we call the immense power that it obviously did still enjoy? This is where dominance comes back in. The states of the South might have lost their ideological faith(s) that prescribed continued optimism about a world that was (not coincidentally) American-led. This had opened a Pandora’s Box of menacing forces, from Serbian nationalism to jihadism. Far more worrisome to the United States was the profound shift of the global political economy in favor of East Asia — a development with the potential to upend what had been the world’s hierarchy for five-hundred years (Arrighi, 2009: 1-10). But what the United States did still have was its coercive apparatus, in the form of a military power without parallel in world history . Well-meaning left-liberal authors have expressed bafflement at the fact that the end of the Cold War only intensified American militarism. But American actions actually made sense — at least as much sense as megalomania borne of desperation can make. For the conflict that had just ended had been a simulated one, a Cold War — but now, America was gearing up to fight a real one. The United States might no longer be able to be the world’s leader, but it just might still become its ruler. No time was wasted mapping a strategy for how this might be accomplished:

“The United States is the world’s only superpower, combining preeminent military power, global technological leadership, and the world’s largest economy. Moreover, America stands at the head of a system of alliances which includes the world’s other leading democratic powers. At present the United States faces no global rival. America’s grand strategy should aim to preserve and extend this advantageous position as far into the future as possible … Preserving the desirable strategic
situation in which the United States now finds itself requires a globally preeminent
military capability both today and in the future” (Donnelly et. al., 2000: i).

The Project for a New American Century has received no shortage of attention from anti-imperialists, if only because of its comic-book villain rhetoric. However, its real historical significance has been fully grasped by few. Arrighi provided an invaluable analysis of the true grandiosity of the PNAC project. In brief, his argument was that the United States sought to end capitalist history — that is, a history of hegemonic cycles in which the American one was rapidly winding down. This meant the creation of what would effectively be a single world government entirely monopolized by the United States (Arrighi, 1994: 366-370). The first step was to discard the consensus-based institutions of postwar American hegemony, like the UN — which started with the overtly illegal bombing of Serbia in 1999 (Arrighi, 2009: 185). Obviously you can’t get completely literal about the idea of a world-state. But equally, you can’t understand unipolarity and ‘full spectrum’ dominance without realizing the ambition was to approximate one to a degree never before attempted. The United States attempted to take control of the world’s key reserves of energy and mineral resources through overt military conquest (as was attempted in Iraq and Afghanistan). It absorbed the potentially autonomous government-making capacities of the European Union, making that institution an appendage of the Atlantic security complex (Sakwa, 2020: 227-234). And perhaps most consequentially of all, America sought to expand its war-making apparatus (in the form of NATO) to an extent that would allow decisive control of the Eurasian landmass (Brzezinski, 2016). The United States was trying to effectively make it impossible for a hegemonic successor to ever emerge, as prescribed explicitly by the infamous Wolfowitz Doctrine.

If the world-state only every appeared in the broadest of outlines, this is because each individual step taken to create it ended in pyrrhic victory or spectacular failure. America tore Kosovo from Serbia — at the expense of making new enemies inside the Russian security apparatus. Saddam Hussein was overthrown — but the nation-building project in Iraq was a humiliating failure, and much of world public opinion was radicalized against the United States. The Taliban was removed — but managed to bleed NATO forces for twenty years and then effortlessly swept back into power once they admitted defeat. Wesley Clark infamously said that “We’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran” (Clark and Goodman, 2007: 3).Of these interventions, none has turned out as an unambiguous US success and several were never even able to be attempted. That’s not to say that the world-state project was decisively vanquished by the failure of the War on Terror, but it is certainly dying a death by a thousand cuts. As I was writing this, news broke of a China-brokered rapprochement between Iran and Saudi Arabia, a development that could well push West Asia’s oil reserves further out of the American grasp. The latest act is playing out in Ukraine, where in spite of Russian military setbacks it does not seem possible for the United States to achieve an unambiguous victory. Such a victory would at the very least have to consist of Ukrainian proxy forces retaking all the territory they held prior to 02/24/22, which seems unlikely. Additionally, the United States has been reduced to blowing up the critical energy infrastructure of its own allies (Hersh, 2023). That is not the behavior of a secure capitalist hegemon — a mafioso doesn’t threaten people for protection money he thinks that they would willingly pay. Extraordinary acts like the Nord Stream II bombing are a sign that the United States is aware that the incentives to take its side are now far from self-evident. They represent an attempt to strong-arm continued flows of subsidy for US wealth and power (Arrighi, 2009: 254-259), in this case out of the dynamic German industrial economy.

Since I started out by talking about Twitter, let’s talk about a common analogy in that space — between US hegemony and historical fascism, this idea of NATO as a ‘Fourth Reich.’ Given that the period of American hegemony as described here involved formal decolonization, progressive aspirations for ‘development,’ and a degree of compromise with the world’s anti-systemic movements, this doesn’t seem historically defensible (though it’s fun to argue). Or to put it more simply: the period of postwar US hegemony saw a massive expansion of the interstate system (in the form of decolonization) while the Nazi goal was precisely the opposite (in the form of creating a new colonial zone in Eurasia). But witness how Adam Tooze characterizes the objectives of Nazi militarism:

“As Hitler himself had put it in his 'Second Book', if the German state could not secure sufficient Lebensraum for the German people, 'all social hopes' were 'utopian promises without the least real value'. The real instrument for the attainment of American-style consumer affluence was the newly assembled Wehrmacht, the instrument through which Germany would achieve American-style living space” (Tooze, 2006: 162).

And now compare that with Arrighi’s sketch of if the US world-government project were to succeed:

“As it turns out, the latest act of the tragedy, played out in Iraq, has shown that the United States does not have the power to impose coercively upon the world its right to an extravagant way of life and must therefore pay an increasing price for the preservation of that right. But the fact remains that not even a quarter of China's and India's population can adopt the American way of producing and consuming without choking themselves and everybody else to death” (Arrighi, 2009: 388)

The point being, I’m not sure it makes sense to identify what America is doing now as a continuation of capitalist imperialism plain and simple (however one defines that). Rather, for the past three-odd decades the United States has been trying to lay the groundwork for a form of post-capitalist imperialism. Post-capitalist in what sense? In the sense that American economic opulence would be founded on a tributary logic of accumulation backed up solely by coercive war-making capacity. That is, accumulation dictated by politics rather than on the basis of the endless accumulation of capital as an end in itself. The existing world-system would end in favor of one where all of its hierarchical, polarizing, and exploitative aspects are entrenched further. I guess whether you see ‘multipolarity’ as a competing post-capitalist project or not depends on if you think China’s rise is the beginning of a new hegemonic cycle. I don’t, for reasons that are far beyond the scope of this piece. But keep in mind the following:

“Structural crises cannot be overcome. The existing system cannot survive. The period is one of chaotic wild fluctuations in everything. There is a very fierce political battle over to which of two alternatives (the forks of the bifurcation) the world collectively will tilt. The two alternatives can be broadly described. On the one side, there are those who wish to replace capitalism with a non-capitalist system that will retain all of capitalism’s worst features – hierarchy, exploitation and polarization. And on the other side there are those who seek to create a historical system that has never yet existed, one based on relative democracy and relative equality” (Samalavičius and Wallerstein, 2013: 3).

And if the (explicitly!) detailed, clearest vision for creating the former is emanating from the United States, I don’t see how you have the latter without the emergence of “greater equality among the world's civilizations” (Arrighi, 2009: 8).

References

Arrighi, Giovanni. Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the twenty-first century. Verso books, 2009.

Arrighi, Giovanni. The long twentieth century: Money, power, and the origins of our times. verso, 1994.

Brzezinski, Zbigniew. The grand chessboard: American primacy and its geostrategic imperatives. Basic books, 2016.

Clark, Wesley, and Amy Goodman. "Global Warfare: We're Going to Take out 7 Countries in 5 Years: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan & Iran." interview by Amy Goodman, Democracy Now (2007).

Donnelly, Thomas, Donald Kagan, and Gary Schmitt. Rebuilding America's Defenses: strategy, forces and resources for a new century. Project for the New American Century, 2000.

Hersh, Seymour. “How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline.” Substack newsletter. Seymour Hersh (blog), February 8, 2023. https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/how-america-took-out-the-nord-stream.

Sakwa, Richard. Frontline Ukraine: Crisis in the Borderlands. First edition. London, England: I.B. Tauris, 2020.

Samalavičius, Almantas, and Immanuel Wallerstein. “A Conversation with Immanuel Wallerstein,” 2013. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Almantas-Samalavicius/publication/336554633_New_world-system_A_conversation_with_Immanuel_Wallerstein/links/5ea8563d92851cb267608df9/New-world-system-A-conversation-with-Immanuel-Wallerstein.pdf

Tooze, Adam. The Wages of Destruction: the Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy. London: Allen Lane, 2006.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. "After developmentalism and globalization, what?." Social forces 83, no. 3 (2005): 1263-1278.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. "The collapse of liberalism." Socialist Register 28 (1992).