>rkm wrote: >> Isn't the primary consquence of the EU to lubricate the sellout of Europe >> to globalization? Isn't the concept of an "economically strong Europe" (a >> competitor to the US and Japan) completely out of date under globalization? 1/30/98, Dennis R Redmond wrote to wsn: >No. Globalization is creating gigantic transnational macroregions in the >world economy, from the Pacific Rim to Central Europe. Kohl and his clones >are not con artists: they're the picked representatives of the >Eurokeiretsu, whose combined financial-industrial might outweighs that of >the USA, but whose role in the world economy is still second-tier. This is the standard apologetic for the EU. It fails to stand up to analysis, and in particular it ignores that globalization has undermined the whole notion of "national" as a focus of economic identity and activity. The EU will simply be a very large nation, and as we have already seen in the US and Japan, the prosperity of corporations is no longer of much relevance to the prosperity of the nations which were once called home. Domestic neoliberalism, a core element of globalization, takes the nation out of the economic loop. The nation has (under mature globalization) minimized power to regulate economic activity and minimized benefit from the flow of money in the economy. The ideal globalist nation is one which is in debt to the IMF and which has little in its budget other than debt retirement and police forces. We have seen the future, and it is the Third World. Japanese TNC's, for example, are becoming entities whose stock is traded globally and which produce goods in Asia for exportation to world markets while paying minimal taxes to anyone - what has that, really, to do with Japan? Kohl and his clones _are_ con artists. One of the most direct pieces of evidence is the zealousness with which neoliberal fundamentalism is being made part of the Eurpeanization process. Why was the Maastricht Treaty so strongly neoliberal? Why wasn't it closer to the center of European economic practices? Why does the initial Euro currency need to be bundled with a major shift toward austerity budgeting? The answer, quite simply, is that the elite knew union could be made into a winning political concept, and they decided to use the unification process to smuggle their own globalist camels. Thus they are softening up Europe - the home of the core's most robust democracies - prior to the full globalist assault. You won't see Brussels opposing the MAI the way Canada is beginning to do - or the way France might if it were charting its own best course. >Eurocapitalists have internal squabbles, but they're united on one thing: >they're not interested in subsidizing the consumption binge of US ruling >elites (the US is a net debtor to the EU/Japan). The euro is about >toppling the dollar's status as world reserve currency, and ultimately, >about toppling the rule of the US Empire itself. Again, you're completely missing that globalization has fundamentally transformed the meaning of "nation" and "imperialism". There is no US Empire - that was a _possible_ postwar scenario, but it failed to materialize. Globalization is the _alternative_ to a US Empire. When the US fought in Vietnam, it was not to make it a colony - it was to maintain the boundaries of the periphery on behalf of the core-periphery system generally. The US had wanted France to accomplish the border-patrol function, but Ho was too much for the French. And when the US attacked Iraq, it was not to take control of Iraq - it was in pursuit of globalist objectives - in particular to establish the legitimacy by precedent of a neo-imperialist ordering paradigm, aka the "NWO": Pentagon + NATO = Judge Dredd. The US dollar is the flywheel that more or less stabilizes the global economy. Similarly the Pentagon has been since 1945 the stabilizer of the core-perphery system. It is abundantly clear from the postwar experience that these considerable US-wielded powers have been used to support global capitalism generally, not US aggrandizement in particular. The various "miracles" (German, Japanese, Korean, whatever) have been the intent of US policy, not accidental by-products. Capitalist interests have firmly controlled major US policy making since 1945, partly because of the immense corporate war-production infrastructure developed during the war. It just so happens that the vision of that elite has been "open global markets" rather than "a global US sphere of interest". Europe acceded to this vision by giving up its colonies. Neo-imperialism is collective imperialism. The core has given up national competition, and hence the raison d'etre for a strong nation state. Since the collapse of the out-of-system socialist block, which removed another nation-binding force, the collapse of the nation state has been rapid. You (Dennis) and others are rationalizing the EU by means of an analysis which is long past its use-by date. rkm
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