The end of the Pax Americana -- or America as sole super-power -- is striking enough. And though there are US gesticulations (Rice and humanitarian troops), isn't that just what they are?

When locusts move on, they leave nothing behind

I think that the Globalization 2.0 is dead as the dodo.

I've been under the impression that this was the case for a while now, and I think that the appropriate reference isn't Keynes it's Polanyi.  It's about the market turning every into commodities and sucking the sacred out of life, and societies and people clutching for anything that offers even a passing hope of reconnecting with a world in which daily life operated on relations between people instead of have money being the universal medium of the human experience.

I think that economist and the political scientist of the current era need to through out the models of the post war world culminating in the economic takeover of the social sciences, and look back to look forward.

To look back to what happened the first time that globalization collapsed, and take the lessons from that time so that they don't have to be learned again.

Capitalism has to be tamed before it sucks the last bits of what's human, what has a soul, out of life.  Because when capitalism is allowed to turn life into a matter of so many units of utility, the resulting emptiness drives people to look for anything that can give their life meaning.  That can reconnect with the sacred and the human.  

The story of globalization has been that there are individuals and there is the sum total of all individuals everywhere.

But there is to be no such thing as society.  There is to be no connection between individuals that occurs outside the context of the market.


And I'll give my consent to any government that does not deny a man a living wage-Billy Bragg

" ... the end of the Pax Americana -- the era in which the United States more or less maintained a monopoly on the use of military force."

Now that multinational corporations can rent military forces (Blackwater) equal or better than the US, things could get really interesting.  These corporations now have all of the assets of countries without home populations which have to be appeased/enslaved.

Ordinary people are screwed.  And deserve it.  My generation had a chance to produce a better world and we settled for a comfortable middle class existence with an RV parked in the driveway.  The kids are REALLY fucked.  Glad I don't have any.

The rooster crows at MIDNITE. Ooooooooooh!

I don't really agree about the "Pax Americana" stuff at this moment. I don't think you can say the Georgia situation is really more destabilising (yet) than various other Cold War conflicts.

I do think Globalisation is under a lot of pressure, but mostly because it's been a vehicle of making the rich richer and the rest of us poorer.

Op-Ed Columnist - The Great Illusion - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com

Europe's dependence on Russian energy, especially natural gas, now looks very dangerous -- more dangerous, arguably, than its dependence on Middle Eastern oil. After all, Russia has already used gas as a weapon: in 2006, it cut off supplies to Ukraine amid a dispute over prices.

Jerome a Paris:

infrastructure bottlenecks

work both ways: existing pipelines mean that Russia can only send its gas to where the pipelines go, ie to Europe (or nowhere at all).

The gas relationship is a co-dependency, and the "energy weapon" goes both ways, as the Poles and Ukrainians have amply demonstrated by holding the transit gas hostage.

Cynicism is intellectual treason.

Looking at the history of trade, the economic elite have usually lived in a "Global Economy" through the transportation of high-value goods.  The Silk Road was the means by which luxury goods were transported across Eurasia.  The Viking trade routes across northern Europe and down the Russian river to Byzantium.  The Spice Trade of the 16th century.  

As the trade routes became better known and technology improved, compare the knorr of the Vikings to the clipper ships on the tea run, it became profitable to ship 'down market' goods and eventually mass-market goods.  One decided benefit to this process was a local crop failure no longer meant local starvation as was common previously.

Today, of course, everything is shipped everywhere.

I argue the economic hardship of the 1930s created a hiccup in a long standing trend.  We're not at the end of an Era but, rather, entering a period when the international trade system is being subjected to feedback shocks such as rising fuel costs, relocation of product points of origination, and systematic financial shocks such as the fall in the US dollar.

Och nu den svenska kocken bakar en Alaskan älg jägare. Bonk! Bonk! Bonk!

Krugman ends his column with an interesting assertion:

... war among the nations of Western Europe really does seem inconceivable now, not so much because of economic ties as because of shared democratic values.

Much of the world, however, including nations that play a key role in the global economy, doesn't share those values. Most of us have proceeded on the belief that, at least as far as economics goes, this doesn't matter -- that we can count on world trade continuing to flow freely simply because it's so profitable. But that's not a safe assumption. ...

I think Krugman is warm, but does not quite nail it.

First, he is not talking about "shared democratic values", but "shared identity" -- even if that identity, as "Western European", is not explicitly stated or precisely delineated, and even if it is in large part based on those shared democratic values (as well as shared culture, religion, I would even say race).

Second, war in Western Europe seems inconceivable now not only because of shared Western European identity, but also because of shared economic security.  Take away the latter, and shared identity would not be enough to rule out war in Western Europe.

Although there is both a lack of shared identity (e.g. as "human beings" or as "creatures of the Earth") as well as a lack of shared economic security among the peoples of the world, at this point the more likely reason for a major war to ruin Pax Americana is the latter, not the former.

Cynicism is intellectual treason.

The state of affairs at the end of the 19th century was the scrabble for empire.  The stability enjoyed by wealthy Englishmen who rang round the empire before WWI is overstated.  There were any number of imperial conflicts and skirmishes before and after the war between the European powers-think of the Great Game in the Middle East- and with the never-quite-tame locals- the Irish were a real problem.  The ease of those years was quite one-sided.  Were Indians contemplating the glories of world trade in 1915?  The radical critic Hannah Arendt following John Hobson trances nationalism, and more particularly totalitarianism, back to the megalomania of European capitalist expansionism.  She argues that capitalists at the end of the 19th century came to the limits of economic expansion within the borders of their own countries and turned to foreign markets for investments and resources.  To create the access they needed, and the stability for their investments they would need afterward, they turned to the military power of the state.  They preferred above all to run the accumulation of markets and resources without the "consciousness" of the home nation-state which would try to meter out justice where economic interests were to reign supreme.  In essence the capitalists and their sympathizers in government wanted to privatize the power monopoly of the nation-state.  They convinced the nation that their class interest was the interest of the all.  Jingoism and the patina of liberal goals for the conquered peoples (they were of course called "liberated") were necessary to cover the private and illegitimate nature of the imperial project.  How else can the brutality of invasion and occupation be legitimized to a nation whose own liberal laws prohibited such arbitrary and exploitative violence?  In any event the nationalism of jingoism and the noble cause of the White Man's Burden tends to awaken nationalism in the conquered people.

For Arendt the endless accumulation of wealth is followed logically and necessarily by the endless accumulation of power.  A society based on power accumulation, as opposed to say natural rights and human capacity, is one in which each member is degraded in a power accumulating-machine.  Nationalism results when identity with the in-group, and the leader, and the national cause, comes to fill the void of belonging created by rootlessness.  Power, which is survival, for the nation, in which the individual disappears, is all that there is in life.

If we accept Arendt's thesis the abandonment of the nation by the capitalist class for the highest profits to be found should result when imperial control gives way to organized and secure flow of capital across the world.  Contempt for the nation is evident when whole cities or whole regions of a given country are called natural failures in the winner take all world of Manchester Capitalism.  Parliament should not reflect the interests of the nation, which does not exist in Darwinian struggle, instead it should reflect in interests of the elite winners in the global game.  Unfortunately the flow of capital is secured by agreements between states.  A system of prosperity that only benefits a super-national minority living within the borders of the state will result in the national conscience taking control of the policy making apparatus.