Martin Jacques

Category: Geopolitics, globalisation

  • Cold war, take two

    US v China will soon be the dominant fault line of global politics

    Ever since 9/11, the US and China have been rubbing along nicely. The US needed China’s support in the war against terror and China is anxious to create the best conditions for its economic growth. But how long will this latest honeymoon last? A string of recent announcements coming out of Washington suggest that the Bush administration may be adopting a rather more abrasive position.

    First, China was attacked for the huge wave of textile imports that followed the lifting of the global quota agreement at the beginning of the year, a decision the US had 10 years to prepare for. The US has now imposed quotas on Chinese textiles, as has the EU. Meanwhile the US treasury has demanded that China revalue the yuan within the next six months, describing its currency policies as “highly distortionary”. In fact, even if China does revalue the yuan, it will make precious little difference to America’s huge current account deficit; moreover China’s own current account is broadly in balance, suggesting that the case for revaluation is hardly overwhelming.

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  • East is east – get used to it

    As Japan has shown, and China will too, the west’s values are not necessarily universal

    Not so long ago, Japan was the height of fashion. Then came the post-bubble recession and it rapidly faded into the background, condemned as yesterday’s story. The same happened to the Asian tigers: until 1997 they were the flavour of the month, but with the Asian financial crisis they sank into relative obscurity. No doubt the same fate will befall China in due course, though perhaps a little less dramatically because of its sheer size and import.

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  • The neocon revolution

    US unilateralism was a means of breaking the old order. Now it is building new alliances

    With any new political phenomenon, there is always a tendency to underestimate its novelty and treat it as some kind of short-term aberration. I vividly recall how long it took commentators and analysts, on the right and left, to recognise that Thatcherism was something quite new and here to stay. Similar doubts greeted the Bush administration and the neocon revolution: its novelty would be short-lived, it would not last and it was just not viable. It is always hard to imagine a new kind of world, easier to think of the future as an extension of the past, and difficult to comprehend a paradigm shift and grasp a new kind of logic.

    There was speculation last autumn that the second Bush term would be different, that the breach with Europe would be healed as a matter of necessity, that the US could not afford another Iraq, that somehow the new position was unsustainable. Already, however, from last November’s presidential election it was clear that the neocon revolution had wide popular support and serious electoral roots, that it was establishing a new kind of domestic political hegemony. In fact, the right has been setting the political agenda in the US for at least 30 years and that is now true with a vengeance. All the indications suggest that the revolution is continuing apace.

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  • No monopoly on modernity

    American dominance is bound to wither as Asia’s confidence grows

    In President Bush’s inauguration speech, he pledged to support “the expansion of freedom in all the world”, deploying the words free or freedom no less than 25 times in 20 short minutes. The neoconservative strategy is quite explicit: to bend the world to America’s will; to reshape it according to the interests of a born-again superpower. There is something more than a little chilling about this. Even though the Iraqi occupation has gone seriously awry, the United States still does not recognise the constraints on its own power and ambition.

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  • Democracy isn’t working

    It is the west’s calling card, but its global applicability is now in doubt

    However implausibly, President Bush continues to reiterate his commitment to the early introduction of democracy in Iraq. Indeed, the idea of democratic reform in the Arab world has been central to the Anglo-American position on Iraq. There should be nothing surprising in that. Democracy has become the universal calling card of the west, the mantra that is chanted at every country that falls short (when politically convenient, of course), the ubiquitous solution to the problems of countries that are not democratic.

    The boast about democracy is largely a product of the last half-century, following the defeat of fascism. Before that, a large slice of Europe remained mired in dictatorship, often of an extremely brutal and distasteful kind. The idea of democracy as a western virtue was blooded during the cold-war struggle against communism, though its use remained highly selective: those many dictatorships that sided with the west were happily awarded membership of the “free world”; “freedom” took precedence over democracy, regimes as inimical to democracy as apartheid South Africa, Diem’s South Vietnam and Franco’s Spain were welcomed into the fold. Following the collapse of communism, however, “free markets and democracy” became for the first time – at least in principle – the universal prescription for each and every country.

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  • Football’s new world order

    Football has conquered the world. Some of the brightest stars in Portugal this summer will have been born in Africa and Latin America, and top European clubs increasingly sign players from every continent. Martin Jacques talks to players, fans, businessmen and the head of Fifa to discover how globalisation is changing football – for better and worse – and why international competitions may yet save the game from rampant greed

    The European Championship was once a lily-white occasion. No longer. The teams of the former great imperial powers, such as England, France and Holland, are today kaleidoscopes of colour, mirrors image of the people who populate their great urban centres. Their sides are ethnically diverse – breathtakingly so in the case of France – a tribute to Africa and the Caribbean as much as Europe itself. When England play France on 13 June, up to half the players on the pitch will be black or brown. The tournament may be called the European Championship, but it is also, at the same time, a global occasion, invigorated and inspired by the rhythms and athleticism of other continents.

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  • Our moral Waterloo

    The claims of western values are mocked by Iraq and the rise of Asia 

    Underpinning the argument in support of the invasion of Iraq has been the idea of the moral virtue of the west. In contrast to Saddam Hussein’s brutal dictatorship, the “coalition” espouses the values of democracy and human rights. The invasion of Iraq represented the high watermark of western moral virtue. In retrospect, it is clear that the idea had been gaining momentum since two coincidental events in the 1970s: the end of the Vietnam war, which profoundly scarred the reputation of the United States, and the beginning of the modern era of globalisation. With Vietnam out of the way, and globalisation the new bearer of western and, above all, American values, the latter found an ever-expanding global audience, a process enormously boosted by the collapse of communism.

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  • The return of people’s war

    Iraq shows the west and its new liberal imperialists have forgotten the lessons of history

    Two very different innovations have dominated warfare in the past 60 years. The first was the invention of nuclear weapons, which brought to an end 150 years of a military system based on total war. Nuclear weapons have, at least until now, been the preserve of an exclusive minority, headed by the United States. Even today, only eight nations admit to possessing them. The second innovation could not have been more different. It was, as Jonathan Schell points out in his new book, The Unconquerable World, the development of a new kind of people’s war against foreign invaders. Whereas nuclear weapons were an expression of the very latest technology, and therefore the preserve of the rich world, people’s war belonged to the opposite end of the scale. People’s war could not afford the latest technology, or anything like it. Instead, it depended on mobilising popular support.

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  • Europe and the US are now adrift

    Spain confirms the huge impact the Iraq war has had on our world

    The US and Britain now find themselves that bit more isolated. Spain’s exit from the ranks of supporters of the Iraq war may have been surprising, but hardly unexpected. Its government, in its support of the invasion, defied not simply half the population, as in the case of Britain, but the overwhelming majority. Clearly there was a price to pay, which has been paid by the Aznar government, though only following a horrific and tragic event. Inevitably, it poses the question as to whether other governments which have defied the will of the people in such a flagrant manner might pay a similar price. There was barely a democratic country in the world where, at the time of the invasion, the majority of the people supported it – barring the obvious exception of the US.

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  • A year of thwarted ambition

    War in Iraq revealed the likely limits to American imperial power

    Saddam Hussein’s arrest provided a long overdue, and desperately needed, morale-booster for the American and British governments. The fact that they had succeeded in finding neither Saddam nor Osama bin Laden had lent an air of ridicule to American military grandiloquence. The failure to capture Saddam spoke eloquently of an occupation that had veered far off course from the confident predictions that had been made at the time of the invasion.

    We will have to wait and see what the longer-term effect of Saddam’s arrest proves to be. Combined with Libya’s new contrition, it should, for a period at least, ease some of the domestic pressure on Bush and perhaps even Blair. But it seems unlikely that it will change much, especially where it matters most, on the ground in Iraq.

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