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GLOBALIZATION AND WAR:DOUG MACDONALD

Dr. Doug Macdonald is Associate Professor of Political Science at Colgate University and author of Adventures in Chaos: American Intervention for Reform in the Third World and is an expert on American Defense and Terrorism policies, particularly as they relate to Asia. Professor Macdonald has held a number of distinguished positions including Director of the International Relations Program at Colgate University and Senior Research Fellow at The Nobel Institute in Oslo, Norway.

Globalization and War

by Doug Macdonald

I am going to concentrate my remarks on the question of Globalization and terrorism, as that is the main means of conflict that seems to have emerged since the end of the Cold War, and the acceleration of trends that had been developing for decades that we now call Globalization.

Let me begin with a working definition. Globalization has been defined in various ways, but to me it is the spread of neoliberal economic and political reforms, the diffusion of new technologies of information, especially the internet, the lowering of barriers to trade through the WTO and other international institutions, and the internationalization of capital. Taken together, this sweeping tide of change is both exhilarating and, to the vulnerable, frightening.

The reason that these changes are unsettling in Third World countries is that they disrupt old patterns of behavior and it is almost impossible, as in remote areas in the past, to avoid their effects. It is not a coincidence that many Islamist terrorists, not all, are from rural areas, or are newly arrived to urban life. These urban cultural challenges to established value systems can lead to violence, and lead minority groups in some countries to rebel. Globalization in this regard is not seen as an increase in opportunities or the hope of a better future, but as a destructive force that is destroying traditional ways of life. Joseph Schumpeter’s “creative destruction” inherent in industrialization is not appreciated everywhere, as a concept or as a process.

Some of these movements are ironically partly the result of democratization, the expressed desire for which has been spreading around the world. Neoliberal political reforms decentralize power in the political realm and weaken the authority of already weak states. In the area of the world I am most interested in, Southeast Asia, in the newly democratic countries of the Philippines, Indonesia, and Thailand, there is a tremendous distrust of the military and other security forces because of the recent dictatorships that has hampered the war on terror in those countries. It is also worth noting that these three countries have the most troublesome terrorist problems in the region. Countries that have sufficient economic “safety nets” and relatively strong states, such as Singapore and Malaysia, have relatively slight terror problems.

Let me illustrate with an example of how Globalization-driven reforms can have the unintended consequence of creating violent conflict. In Thailand several years ago, the government decided to push through educational reforms, specifically increasing the number of years of schooling mandated by the state from six to nine years. This was done for two primary reasons. First, the change was meant to help reduce the educational and economic disparities between rural and urban areas, the former being far behind in development. Second, it was decided that if Thailand was to become more competitive in the global marketplace, it would need better educated citizens. Their models for reform appear to have been earlier programs along these lines by Singapore and Malaysia.

A good, progressive, modernizing neoliberal reform, right? The problem was that in the heavily Muslim areas along the Malaysian border, the population – that speaks a different language, and is ethnically Malay and overwhelmingly Muslim – resented the Thai-Buddhist nationalist-secularist curriculum. When the government began closing religious schools in those areas that preached separatism, in January, 2004 tensions spilled over into violence. Since January, 2004 over 1,000 people have been killed. Twenty-seven percent of the attacks have been on educational institutions. The insurgency, perhaps the worst in the region, has no chance of overthrowing the government – Muslims are only 4% of the population. But it is causing numbers of deaths, widespread Buddhist flight from the affected areas, and consuming an inordinate amount of government time and resources. All because of a reform that by neoliberal, secularist standards was both helpful and just.

This is not an invitation to throw away Globalization, even if we could. But it may never lead to the better world it promises if those of us that support it have to shoot our way into dominance. We should not make Marx’s mistake when he saw the disruptive effects of early industrialization in Europe as capitalism’s death throes rather than its birth pangs. But we need to design these changes in more sensible and intelligent ways, and realize that we have a selling job to do, even at the lowest levels of the socio-economic totem pole. Perhaps most there. If we charge ahead with a “bottom line,”macro-economic standard only, we can expect more conflict and terroristic wars. We may have to face the fact that neoliberal decentralization in the form of democracy may be the best long term strategy, but can have disruptive and even catastrophic effects in the short run. I see no easy solution to the problem, but it deserves more attention than it is getting, especially from economists.

GLOBALIZATION AND WAR: SIMON WORLD

Simon is the Hong Kong based, anonymous proprietor of the highly regarded and enormously popular Simon World blog. Simon’s timely postings, steady output and incisive, crisp, commentary on Asian and world affairs have won him many devoted readers in an ever more competitive blogosphere.

Globalization and war

by Simon

The upcoming WTO conference in Hong Kong has everyone on edge. Hong Kong’s security forces are preparing for the inevitable anti-trade protests. The governments’ participating are inching towards an agreement, but it is by no means certain. Hong Kong’s government frets it will play host to a giant farce, with nothing agreed and everyone’s time wasted. Yet the WTO represents one of the greatest economic achievements of the modern era: trade liberalization. And Hong Kong embodies the free trade spirit better than almost any place on Earth.

Can an economically integrated and trading world go to war? It certainly managed to in 1914. China’s ongoing stirring of nationalism, especially against the Japanese and Taiwan, serves a political purpose that is at odds with the economic benefits trade and investment between these places. On the other hand, China has become in the naughties what Japan was in the eighties to America – the trade and economic bogey-man. There are plenty on both sides of that fence that can envisage war between two of the world’s biggest trading partners. It might not be good for Wal-Mart but a confrontation over Taiwan is a possibility.

And yet globalization could well act as a mitigating circumstance. Will China’s rulers, for all their bluster, squander the value of their massive holdings of US government debt, the massive benefits that export-led growth has brought to China’s economy? Certainly one consequence of globalization is it has made war more costly. Not just first order costs, but broader economic costs as well. Upping the costs and reducing the benfits of going to war makes globalization a force for moderation and peace.

But wait, there’s more. The flipside of this is the globalization of war and especially the global market for military weapons and technology. Pakistan made a business of exporting nuclear technology. It is widely thought China has exported military technology to unsavory regimes, and North Korea is famous for its missile exports. So in that regard globalization has become a force for war.

There’s more again. China’s opening up to the world through globalization has seen it create a vigorous appetite for commodities and energy. With its leadership primarily focused on economic growth at almost any cost, combined with a “flexible” ideology and foreign policy, has meant China has formed alliances and invested in far flung corners of the world that are inherently unstable or alien to liberal democracies. There are examples from the Middle East, Central Europe and Africa that all fit into this category. Whereas it could be argued that America’s foreign policy is not solely or even primarily driven by economic concerns, China’s is and that leads to allies you wouldn’t want to take home to your Mum. Chalk it up as another minus for globalization.

But I’m not here to finish on a pessimistic note. I am a firm believer in free trade and globalization for both its economic benefits, especially to the poor, and as a driver of a more peaceful and safer world. The globalization of culture is often characterized as the “Disneyfication” (or McDonaldisation, or Hollywodisation, whichever American cultural icon you choose) of the world and is derided as a “bad thing”. But these companies and groups provide products that are popular with consumers the world over. No-one is forced to visit Disneyland, or eat a Big Mac, or watch a movie. But people want to. Moreover America remains the favoured destination for immigrants and would-be immigrants the world over, including in China. The American dream is a global one. This success sometimes drives envy, but America’s prosperity is widely admired. The foundations of that success? Liberal capitalist democracy. If globalization can bring images and ideas of liberal capitalist democracy to those who live without it, it can only serve to drive people to aspire to such a society. America’s model is not the only one. But it is the biggest and most successful (and note that I’m an Australian). As people grow richer in countries like China, they will start demanding more secure property rights, rule of law, less tolerance of corruption, more say in how they are governed. Globalization makes countries richer while at the same time constantly exposing populations to the most successful economic and political model the world has devised.

As globalization brings economic growth, it will bring political growth. Countries that are economically successful and growing do not, as a rule, go to war. In a world where there are numerous flashpoints and delicate balances to be maintained, globalization is a key force pushing towards peace. It is that complicated. And that simple.

THE ZENPUNDIT ROUNDTABLE:
ON GLOBALIZATION AND WAR

It is my great pleasure to announce the start of a symposium designed to examine our time as an age of globalization and war.

On Wednesday November 9th I am turning Zenpundit over to a special group of invited academic experts, military veterans, experienced journalists and highly regarded bloggers who will be debating the state of the world and the war we find ourselves in today and perhaps tomorrow. The issues are deep but the range and of the participants is wide and their prose is sharp. I am certain you will find their arguments as challenging and interesting to read as I have these last few days.

The Zenpundit Roundtable:

Austin Bay

Bruce Kesler of The Democracy Project

Professor Doug Macdonald of Colgate University

Simon of Simon World

Professor Sam Crane of Williams College and The Useless Tree

Chester of The Adventures of Chester

Professor RJ Rummel of the University of Hawaii and Democratic Peace

Paul D. Kretkowski of Beacon

Posts will appear in groups of three over the next three days each with a concluding post from me as the host and moderator of the symposium. Comments from the readers, as always, are welcome and encouraged. Many of the authors will be cross-posting and linking for further discussion on their own blogs as well.

“Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.”

John Milton

“To speak his thoughts is every freeman’s right, in peace and war, in council and in fight.”

Homer, The Iliad

TDAXP AND HIS BATTLE WITH THE NATIONMASTER: A LESSON IN NETWORKS

Dan of tdaxp, long a blogfriend of Zenpundit is locked in a consumer complaint battle with an internet information company known as NationMaster. In the day of the dead tree media, there was a saying about the power of big city newspapers ” Don’t get in a pissing contest with somebody who buys ink by the barrel”. Today, an updated version might go like this ” Don’t get in a pissing contest with somebody who is part of a scale free network”

In addition to Dan’s most recent post he has previously posted here ( where you can read Nationmaster’s bullying, psuedo-legal email correspondence) and here ( the original post that ticked off Nationmaster’s executives, including one ” John Steinmetz“).

By choosing to needlessly go the adversarial path with with Dan, a grad student who just wanted his money back, NationMaster ended up getting panned by:

Curzon at Coming Anarchy

Adam at The Metropolis Times

Bill at Dawn’s Early Light

Ryne from Ryne McClaren

Brendan at I hate Linux

Simon at Simon World

NationMaster Watch – a blog established by Dan to do nothing but follow the permutations of Nationmaster’s highly unusual customer relations policy.

Technorati leads with this dispute if you type in ” NationMaster” for your search.

And now I am posting on this story. This is how a network functions. While Curzon and Simon are also blogfriends of mine as well as Dan’s I was not familiar with the other blogs except I hate Linux which I had more heard of than visited. Dan is a ” hub” that connects otherwise unrelated bloggers. For that matter, I’d barely heard of NationMaster either.

Given the number of readers these blogs have I have to wonder about the strategic thinking that went into NationMaster’s response to Dan. Bloggers, I would think, would be a key customer demographic for this corporation and making gestures that engendered good will rather than bad in the blogging community would be the way I would have advised to go.

It is theoretically possible that Dan is a clever but psychotic con man posing as a grad student simply to bilk helpless corporations out of fairly earned dollars – but I kind of doubt it. It seems more likely that some arrogant a-hole in a corner office at NationMaster reacted dismissively when Dan asked for his money back and then decided that Dan ” could be rolled” by pressuring him with a frivolous lawsuit.

Looks like a mistaken premise on NationMaster’s part.

Moreover, in a network situation like this it isn’t just how many people are reading but also whom. I really don’t know who reads these other blogs (though some smart attorneys seem to read tdaxp) but I know who reads mine. Lots of academics, nationally known experts, think tank types, journalists and employees of numerous U.S. Government agencies. Some of these people are exceptionally bright and well-connected – I know this because they send me email – and now they are reading this post, clicking links and reading a heck of a lot about NationMaster.

Not much that’s good, unfortunately.

Just think of how a gracious initial- or even belated – response by NationMaster to Dan’s complaint would have gone over instead. It might still go over well at this late date. No skin off my nose to post that a company decided to do the right thing.

Because Zenpundit is eminently fair and I have goodwill toward one and all, I’m going to do my part to stop a corporation that should know better from continuing to dig a needless hole for itself. Here’s a book recommendation for John Steinmetz of NationMaster – it’s a quick read but it might help prevent customer relations problems like this in the future.

And here’s another.

HETEROGENEITY OF LOYALIST PARAMILITARIES

I attended a Genocide Studies conference today. Multidisciplinary in nature, in some instances crit theory was raising its ugly ( and counterproductive) head. While not a specialist in the Holocaust per se, I do have enough expertise in the subject to have once been a finalist for a fellowship at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. For the life of me though, I could not have explained what an English prof was going on about in terms of ” turning earlier literary models against themselves…overturning the reigning conceptions of man “. Say, what ?

More interesting to me than the droning cant was the experience of one speaker, an anthropologist who specializes in the eastern islands of the Indonesian archipelago, who served as an election monitor for the East Timor independence vote for the Carter Center. She had at that time numerous, harrowing, personal encounters with the wild, anti-independence, militias sponsored by the brutal Indonesian Army and had only narrowly managed to get safely out of East Timor.

I asked her to speak to the demographics of the loyalist paramilitaries that destroyed 70 % of East Timor and raped and murdered thousands of East Timorese. The militias – notably Mahadi, Jati Merah Putih (Real Red and White), Aitarak ( Thorn), Mahadomi, Sakunar, Rajawali, Sera, Mahidi (Dead or Alive), Halilintar(Lightning), Laksaur (Eagle), ABLAI ( Struggle For integration), Darah Merah ( Red Blood), Besi Merah Putih ( Red and White Iron) and the Keaman Rakyat – had little in common with one another aside from violent tactics and Indonesian Army sponsorship.

• The militia members ran the ideological gamut from nationalist, to Islamist to ethnic network and criminal syndicate thugs to Timorese shanghaied into participating to Indonesian and foreign mercenaries. Some militia members were bought for as little as a sack of rice, some drugs and the freedom to rape and pillage.
• Most militia members were drunk and/or high on narcotics while committing atrocities.
• Indonesian troops and police casually supervised militia mayhem – much like German police during Kristallnacht – and shed their uniforms at times to join in.
• The dangerous factionalization of the Indonesian Army plus rivalries between the Army and Navy and Army and police meant that having secured relative safety from the depradations of one militia due to good connections might do little to help you with a militia aligned with another group. Or one exceeding their instructions

It would be interesting to look at the composition of Serb paramilitaries to see if Milosevic’s regime drew upon a similar though Balkan ” scum of the Earth” diversity in carrying out ethnic cleansing campaigns against Bosnian and Kosovar Albanian Muslims, Croats and Slovenes. The Nazis cast a wide pan-European net to fill the ranks of their Waffen- SS and foreign auxillary formations like the Arajs Kommando. Stalin too went through ” ethnic” phases where his secret police apparatus had disproportionate numbers of Jews, Letts, Georgians and other minorities.

Until his paranoia returned of course. Then they were purged and liquidated and replaced by ethnic Great Russians until the next major terror wave. The life of a loyalist paramilitary is a precarious one.