"And every nation has its
appointed term; when their term is reached, neither can they delay it nor can
they advance it an hour (or a moment)." – The Quran (Al-Araf)
Introduction
From
the nation-state anarchy that emerged after the Treaty of Westphalia through
the first decade of the twenty-first century, the international stage has been
in constant transformation, through a series of historical events consisting of
conflicts, treaties and the creation of international organizations, which have
evolved world international relations into a new epoch. From Westphalia onward, individual
nation-states struggled and created alliances in order to pursue and protect
national interests under the model of anarchy.
Through two major international conflicts, World War I and II, in which
the victorious alliance of nation-states established a collective hegemon and
inadvertently propelled a new nation-state power, the United States, to the
international stage creating a world balance of power between capitalism and communism,
termed the Cold War, under the influencing forces of created International
Governmental Organizations such as the United Nations, the World Bank and the
International Monetary Fund. As
anarchical nation-state power struggles consolidated under a single superpower
nation-state after the Cold War and private sector capitalism pushed freely across
the globe through mechanisms of established international governmental
organizations, the world authority model of global governance which
nation-state governments had evolved to became mere mechanisms utilized by a
new model of anarchy that had emerged on the international stage in which
private sector corporate actors ruthlessly competed for resources and interests
as nation-states had once done at the time of Westphalia. The events of the last century have brought
an end of international anarchy between nation-states, consolidating and
constraining nation-states under globalization, while unleashing the anarchy of
private sector capitalism which has marked a new epoch in international
relations.
Nation-State
Anarchy and World War I
As
the young nation-state power, the United States, was on a quietly rising path
of economic strength due to its vast natural resources, its ability to export
to both sides of the European balance of power and the isolated geographic
distance from Europe prior to World War I, the nation-states of Europe were
entangled in thick political chains of anarchy and near the brink of
continental conflict. As a natural
component of nation-state anarchy, alliances contributed heavily in the conditions
that caused World War I as Britain, France and Russia created the Triple
Entente and Germany, Austria and Italy created a Triple Alliance. These alliances were the direct results of
concerns by Britain, Russia and France toward the rapidly rising economic and
military power conversion of unified Germany, as “Germany had pulled even with
Great Britain, the preeminent power in Europe, and was three times wealthier
than France or Russia. In 1913, one year before the war broke out; German
wealth exceeded that of Great Britain by 40 percent”. Germany, on the other hand, had their own
security concerns about being geographically encircled by the nation-states of
the Triple Entente, especially the arms embargo implemented by the Triple
Entente in order to prevent neutral U.S arms sales from reaching Germany.
Commonly
in regional anarchic nation-state conflicts, vulnerable satellite or colonial
territories belonging to or protected by larger nation-states can often create
sparks that ignite regional conflagration.
This was the case leading into World War I when, in 1914,
Austria-Hungary, backed by Germany, declared war on Serbia, which was backed by
Russia, after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. The result was a Russian military
mobilization and a German declaration of war which began what historians call
the Great War, World War I. The United
States would join the side of Britain toward the end of the conflict claiming
the issue of German submarine warfare and the provocative Zimmerman Telegram
which offered Mexico the opportunity to become a German ally.
Nation-State
Anarchy and First Attempt at Collective Security
The
defeat of Germany in World War I brought to the European surface several
ramifications from the Treaty of Versailles which included German surrender of
colonial possessions, heavy economic reparations on Germany and the loss of
German control over the Ruhr Valley, Germany’s leading industrial area, to
French occupation. Even more important
in the aftermath of World War I was the first attempt to establish a liberal
model of collective security in the creation of the League of Nations.
The
liberal League of Nations was a failure in moving the world into a model of
world authority in global governance mainly because it placed all
nation-states, the victorious and the defeated of World War I, on equal footing
as “all Council members, great and small, had a veto”. Despite the intentions behind Wilson’s
Fourteen Points plan and the League of Nations, the goal of collective security
was not reached and the result was a formal meeting place for continued
nation-state anarchy. As a result,
individual nation-states again came face to face with the same balance of
power, along with the same fears and alliances that had originally caused World
War I and Europe once again faced the rise of German economic and military
power, which was erroneously left unified after World War I by the winning
states of that conflict.
The
Second War, Consolidated Balance of Power, and IGOs
Several
pertinent developments occurred after the
conclusion of World War II, in which the winners of WWII repeated the victory
of the First World War, and the United States propelled itself to the position
of an international military power with nuclear capability. Those developments were: 1) the previous mistake of nation-state
equality within the failed League of Nations was corrected in the establishment
of the United Nations Security Council. 2) International Governmental Organizations
aimed to promote private sector capitalism were created at Bretton Woods which
would loosen private sector capitalism from the previous restraints of
nation-state borders. 3) A bipolarity
balance of power developed between communism, led by the Soviet Union in the
East, and Capitalism, led by the United States in the West which began a
massive arms race, beneficial to private sector capitalism, which would stretch
above the planet under the category of space exploration.
World
Authority, UN Security Council, Bretton Woods & Cold Balance
International
anarchy on a nation-state level began degeneration with the establishment of
the United Nations, and more specifically the establishment of the UN Security
Council with five permanent members possessing veto power: the United States, Britain,
France, Russia and China. While the
United Nations were successful in establishing a collective hegemony and world
authority to prevent further international conflict, it did not prevent the
international stage from dividing into bipolarity between the two major
military superpowers after World War II: The communist nation-state of the
Soviet Union, which developed nuclear weapons in 1949, and the United States,
who following World War II would champion the banner of private sector
capitalism by creating the Bretton Woods international organizations of the
International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
These International Governmental Organizations would eventually develop
into powerful instruments that would allow private capital to manipulate, and
eventually control at times, nation-states that had embraced or had been opened
to capitalist markets. It is the
creation of the Bretton Woods international governmental organizations that
mark the beginning phase of private sector anarchy on the international
scene. As the nation-states of the globe
consolidated further into a world authority model under globalization, the more
anarchical model of private sector competition branched out and grew more
competitive. In order to fully
understand the beginning phases of capital anarchy, it is vital to understand
the creations at Bretton Woods.
The
International Monetary Fund, with its current 188 nation-state members, “came
into formal existence in December 1945, when its first 29 member countries
signed its Articles of Agreement. It began operations on March 1, 1947.” The International Monetary Fund is the
organization that sets the international exchange rates between various
nation-state currencies. This
international exchange rate is the vital human skeleton for international
private sector capitalism and allows capital to cross national borders and
assume various physical and monetary forms depending on final destination. After World War II the International Monetary
Fund “began to expand in the late 1950s and during the 1960s as many African
countries became independent and applied for membership. But the Cold War
limited the Fund's membership, with most countries in the sphere of influence
not joining”. The World Bank, on the
other hand, is an International Governmental Organization, also with 188
nation-state members, that had earned its international reputation through nation-state
reconstruction efforts, with conditional loans to open private sector
investment into devastated post-war European nation-states after the Marshall
Plan, and in aftermath of the Cold War, intensified efforts of ushering private
sector capital into post-Soviet states in Eastern Europe and post-colonial
nation-states in Africa. Today, it is
the reconstruction of post-colonial African nation-states by the World Bank and
the infiltration of the private sector while in the period following the Cold War
and the emergence of the U.S. international hegemony, Eastern Europe was the
primary target. In order to grasp the
U.S. position within the World Bank, “The five largest shareholders are,
France, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States”, three of
five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council.
Private
Capital Utilization of World Authority
Using
war ravished Europe as a successful test bed for a global private sector
market, “The original Bretton Woods plan was at first subsumed by the Cold War.
The Marshall Plan announced in 1947 provided the USA with a more immediate
bilateral way to ensure stabilization, investment and reconstruction in Western
Europe. Nevertheless, by the 1950s both
the IMF and the World Bank were modestly assuming a place in the international
economy.”
The
restricting boundaries of the Cold War prevented any further expansion of
international capitalist markets into the Soviet sphere of influence, but after
the collapse of the Soviet Union at the conclusion of the Cold War, the United
States was instantly propelled to the level of unilateral superpower in the
ashes of what was the most equally distributed international balance of power
in history. As a true champion of
international private sector capitalism, the United States and her lesser
nation-state allies instantly went to work through so-called United Nations
Peace Keeping missions throughout Eastern Europe in order to spread the private
market eastward into former Soviet satellite nation-states and bring them into
the world market. The United States was
a founding member of the dual International organizations created at Bretton
Woods, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, and these two
organizations would be main instruments in spreading private sector capitalism
as far as it would extend after the United States Cold War victory against
Soviet Communism. The utilization of the
World Bank and International Monetary Fund, along with the economic and
military might of the United States in the United Nations Security Council were
pivotal in expanding capitalism eastward through so-called UN peacekeeping
operations in territories left unstable, politically void or politically divided,
such as Bosnia and Herzegovina. While
the private sector ushered in by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund
had ridden the coattails of United Nations peacekeeping operations in many
post-colonial African and post-Soviet nation-states in order to target natural
resources, the example of the 1992 war in Bosnia-Herzegovina will clearly
illustrate the methodology that is utilized by these organizations.
UN
Peace Keeping Mission in Bosnia-Herzegovina
The
war in Bosnia between 1992 and 1995 was a direct result of the collapse of the
Soviet Union. Bosnian independence from
Yugoslavia plunged the territory into civil war as “Bosnian Serbs did not want
to break away from Yugoslavia, and so the Serbs left the Bosnian parliament to
form their own parliament. The Bosnian Serb decision to split from the Bosnian
parliament inspired the Bosnian Croats to also declare their autonomy”. The early UN peacekeeping mission in Bosnia,
a territory plunged into civil war, had difficulty in achieving, through
proposed peace negotiations, the goal of stabilizing a unified Bosnian
independence, and a government that could be brought into the world market, and
eventually UN peacekeeping efforts were turned over to NATO military air
strikes, Operation Deliberate Force, and
the champion of world capitalism, the United States, led the way by providing
the most military and most economic contributions to operational missions. This was the case until “U.S. troops marked
the end of their nine-year peacekeeping role in Bosnia on Wednesday [December
24, 2004] as NATO prepared to hand over the task to the European Union in
December [2004]” .
As
the region of Bosnia-Herzegovina began a stabilization process after the Dayton
Peace Accords, the World Bank was eagerly present with lofty promises of
reconstruction funding and the ushering in of foreign private sector capital
investments which would target domestic natural resources in minerals,
petroleum, hydropower, and other resources of commercial importance in
Bosnia-Herzegovina.
Private
Capital Anarchy and Nation-State World Authority
From
the example of the United Nations peacekeeping mission in Serbia, it becomes
clear that nation-state governments under the world authority model burden the
economic costs of military action and also burden the blood of lost national
sons and daughters while private sector actors, using the instruments of the
World Bank and International Monetary Fund in order to gain access to the
natural resources inside nation-state borders while burdening nothing except
capital spending to generate capital profit.
What began as the
establishment of an international market spanning from the United States to war
ravished Europe, gained acceleration with eastward expansion after the collapse
of the Soviet Union and southward in post-colonial nation-states. On the modern stage, nation-states, such as
Iraq and Libya, that do not accept private sector ‘carrots’ are often removed
by UN and NATO military ‘sticks’ and promptly rebuilt by the World Bank Group
and private sector investors. In extreme
cases of military occupation, unsuspecting military members are placed on the
ground to stabilize the region for private sector profiting. The danger of these UN-NATO operations, often
the results of brilliantly placed, inescapable economic sanctions, is that the
most powerful military nation-states on the international scene today are
representative democracies and representative democracies are the easiest
governments on the international stage to be influenced or purchased into
political or military action through the capital of domestic or international
lobbyist forces.
With the massive
increase of multi-national corporations battling for the opportunity to
accumulate capital profits, the nation-states that have created the
international organizations to promote capitalism and opened the international
stage for private sector capitalism have become consolidated, and concreted,
into a world authority model of global government that is easily manipulated,
used and discarded by the anarchy of private sector capital actors. The international stage is no longer the sole
property of nation-states, for nation-states have become the indentured
servants of the new international actor, private sector capital.
References
Nau, Henry. Perspectives on
International Relations. 3rd ed. (Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 2012).
