Dear cj, I've been busy with my book... sorry for the lapse in cj postings. I'll be posting, as a series, a speech delivered by Noam Chomsky to the University of Calgary on 22 September, 1998. rkm ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Date: Wed, 7 Oct 1998 To: •••@••.••• From: •••@••.••• (Jan Slakov) Subject: Chomsky lecture Date: Wed, 30 Sep 1998 12:26:56 -0400 From: Bob Olsen <•••@••.•••> Subject: Naom Chomsky: 22 Sept 1998 A speech delivered by Noam Chomsky, Sept. 22, 1998, at the University of Calgary, Canada The original version, which is probably more suitable for printing, is available at: http://www.acs.ucalgary.ca/~gharris/ This version was formatted for email (shorter lines) by Bob Olsen, Toronto. Renowned scholar and political activist Noam Chomsky spoke Sept. 22 to a crowd of about 3,400 at the Jack Simpson Gymnasium on the University of Calgary campus. The following was transcribed from a cassette recording of the event, by Greg Harris of the U of C's Communications Office. Chomsky, a master of the subordinate clause, often manages to keep several ideas aloft in the same sentence; although highly interesting, his parenthetic speaking style can occasionally challenge the transcriber's skill in deploying punctuation. False starts, ums, wells, and you knows have usually been edited out. If you find this useful (or, alternatively, if you see any egregious errors), email •••@••.••• ---------------------------------------- "Whose World Order: Conflicting Visions" Chomsky: I want to at least mention quite a number of different topics. The mentions are inevitably going to be far too brief; every one of them deserves intensive thought and discussion and they're not at all comprehensive. But what I want to kind of suggest, if I can do it, is that these are some of the threads that out to be woven together to give some kind of coherent picture of where we stand today, what kinds of problems we have to face and where we might find at least a standpoint to begin to think about them in a constructive way. I want to go back a half a century - I think we live very much within an era that was more or less created then. There are occasional moments in human affairs where power relations make it possible to establish social and economic arrangements that actually merit the term world order. Merit might not be the right word. It's not necessarily a phrase that should be invested with positive connotations, as history amply reveals. One of the most dramatic and in fact most easily timed of those moments was about 50 years ago in the aftermath of the most devastating single catastrophe in human history which took place right in the heartland of western civilization. At the end of the war, the United States, of course, had an overwhelming share of global wealth and power and, perfectly naturally, dominant forces within the state corporate nexus in the United States planned to use that power to organize the world as much as they could in accord with their own conceptions of their interests and those they represented. Of course, there were conflicting visions both at home and abroad and they had to be contained, or better, rolled back, to borrow some cold war rhetoric. That was done with varying degrees of success, but in fact the basic conflicts persist and for elementary reasons - they persist because they are about fundamental values; they are about freedom and justice and human dignity and human rights in a world of inequality - great inequality and great concentration of power (the real world, that is); these values quite commonly constitute an arena of conflict between centres of power and most of the rest. A good deal of history revolves around these conflicts in the last half century; this is no exception and I'm sure the next will not be either. Well at the onset of the current era, about a half century ago, the framers of the world order of that day, the new world order of that day, they faced these challenges everywhere. At home, what had to be contained, maybe rolled back, were the very strong commitments of a large majority of the population to social democratic ideals that the business world rightly perceived as a grave threat to their traditional dominance. They were the hazard-facing industrialists in the rising political power of the masses, as the National Association of Manufacturers put it in their internal literature. It was the crisis of democracy that was posed by a population that sought to enter the political arena, as frightened liberal internationalist elites phrased essentially the same problem after the ferment of the 1960s, expressing particular concern about what they called the institutions responsible for indoctrination of the young, which were failing to carry out their disciplining role properly. Similar problems were faced throughout the industrial world. They were enhanced by the prestige and appeal of the anti-fascist resistance, which was a complex affair, but often had radical democratic thrusts. They were enhanced further by the discrediting of the traditional conservative order, which had been linked closely to the fascist system. Reinstating that traditional order in its essentials was a primary task of the early post-war years and it was achieved to a large extent often in not very pretty ways. As in the United States, this project continues. It's taken new forms in the last 25 years, as here and as throughout the world, under the guise of neo-liberalism or economic rationalism or free market doctrine, which is permeated with a good deal of deceit, hypocrisy and maybe outright fraud. All of these issues are strongly very, very much alive right now - here, Europe and elsewhere. In the Third World, the south - the developing world as its euphemistically called - similar problems were compounded by strong pressures, uncontrollable pressures, to overturn the imperial systems, and the legacy of dependency and subordination that they had left. The basic issues were very much the same in most of the world but they were revealed with particular clarity, with starkest clarity, in Latin America for the simple reason that the United States faced no challenge there, no outside challenge, so you see the principles operating in their purest form. There was a real challenge, but it was from the domestic population - no outside challenge. As In Europe, these conflicts in Latin America came to a head even before the war was over, in the case of Latin America very dramatically in February 1945 at a hemispheric conference (Canada was not part of the Western hemisphere in those days, remember, so Western hemisphere means United States to the south. I don't think Canada attended the conference, but maybe I'm mistaken.) The hemispheric conference was supposed to organize affairs for the hemisphere. We know from U.S. internal records now that the United States was deeply concerned with what the State Department called the "philosophy of the new nationalism" that was spreading all over Latin America and indeed all over the world, quoting State Department documents. The philosophy of the new nationalism, which embraced policies designed to bring about a broader distribution of wealth and to raise the standard of living of the masses on the principle that the first beneficiaries of the country's resources are the people of that country. That heresy is called radical nationalism or economic nationalism and of course it has to be stamped out - the first beneficiaries of a country's resources are U.S. investors, their counterparts elsewhere, and local elites who are associated with them. At the hemispheric conference the United States - given the power relations of course the U.S. prevailed - and it imposed what was called an economic charter for the Americas which called for an end to economic nationalism in all its forms. In the cruel and bloody history of the half-century that followed, these remained central themes and they will continue to. They are very much alive today; now they are often framed differently in the context of the investor rights agreements that are mislabeled free trade agreements: NAFTA, the forthcoming, maybe, Multilateral Agreement on Investments, MAI, and what's called globalization, which is a specific form of international integration (not by any means the only necessary form); it's the specific form that's crafted primarily to serve the interests of its designers, again not terribly surprisingly, transnational corporations, financial institutions and the bureaucracies that they control and of course the major states that are part of the system. The most critical part of the Third World was then and I think remains today the Middle East, for the very simple reason that it's the locus of the world's major energy supplies for as far ahead as anybody can see. Hence, it was considered to be, and is still considered to be, of particular importance that the first beneficiaries of that wealth are not the people of the region; rather the resources must be under effective U.S. control, they must be accessible to the industrial world on terms that the United States leadership can see is appropriate and, crucially, the huge profits that are generated must flow primarily to the United States, secondarily to its British junior partner, to borrow the term used by the British Foreign Office rather ruefully to describe its new role in the post Second World War era. This is done in various ways. In part it's recycled by local managers who have to be dependent on the global rulers, a long story which continues. Well quite naturally these arrangements breed continual conflict. Internal U.S. documents describe them in the conventional way. The conflicts are conflicts with radical nationalism, radical Arab nationalism that threatens U.S. dominance. For the public it's put a little differently, varying over time. These days it's international terrorism, or the clash of civilization; tomorrow it will be something new, but it's basically the same ones all the time. The question is, who's going to be the first beneficiaries of the region's resources. These conflicts are likely to become more virulent and ominous in the coming years, at least if the analysis and projection of quite a number of geologists are anywhere near accurate. A reasonably broad consensus (there's plenty of room for disagreement and uncertainty) but a reasonably broad consensus was captured in the headline of a major review article on the topic, in the journal Science - the journal of the American Association of the Advancement of Science a couple of weeks ago. The headline was, "The next oil crisis looms large and perhaps close." It may be a little hard to believe in a period when gasoline prices are at an historic low, but there are many who regard that as an aberration, a short-term aberration. The crisis that many people fear is that the rate of discovery has been declining for some time after having risen steadily since the earliest discovery of oil, and the Gulf region, the Arabian peninsula and the Persian Gulf region, that has by now virtually regained the share of energy production that it had in the early 1970s, (You'll recall that that was sufficient to bring the era of super-cheap energy to a sudden end; it happened to be a temporary end but a foretaste of what lies ahead.) basically back to that share, meaning that degree of power, and that share is expected to increase, in part because world consumption is increasing very rapidly and most of the known energy reserves by a big measure are in that region. And it's also speculated, not apparently implausibly, that something like the 50-per-cent mark of exploitable capacity may not be too far away, maybe within the next few decades. All of this combines to suggest to policy makers and others that the need to control that region is going to become increasingly important and that's going to mean very likely increasing confrontations with radical nationalism. As a kind of a sidelight to this, I think that, very likely, the latest terrorist exchange in the last few weeks might well be seen in this context. I'm referring to the terrorist bombings of the U.S. embassies in Africa, allegedly by groups who are opposed to U.S. domination of the major oil producers, and the U.S. missile attacks on Sudan and Afghanistan. One might ask, why those targets? Well, like the bombings of the embassies in Africa, the U.S. selected targets that were vulnerable, not the ones to which the messages were aimed, in either case. The message for the missile attacks may well have been directed elsewhere, in this case very likely to Riyadh and Teheran. There have been recent steps towards rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Iran, historic enemies, and that's not an appealing prospect for U.S. global managers. It raises fears, which have been lingering for a long time, of regional groupings that will get out of control in the strategically most important part of the world, which holds the greatest material prize in world history - that's quoting U.S. assessments from the late '40s, which still prevail. The U.S. missile attacks have been criticized (you've read plenty of criticisms of them) as being counterproductive (elite opinion has held that) because of their effects on the Sudan and Afghanistan. Well, it's a pragmatic judgment, apparently. The same opinion seems to be largely unconcerned by the fact that, effective or not, there were war crimes - - that's now partially conceded in the case of Sudan. However, just keeping to the pragmatic judgment, it might be evaluated in the light of a secret 1995 study of the U.S. Strategic Command, called Essentials of Post-Cold War Deterrence, which was released recently under the Freedom of Information Act. It's an interesting document. It resurrects Nixon's madman theory, as it was called. It says that the United States should portray itself as irrational and vindictive with leadership elements out of control and it should exploit the nuclear arsenal for that purpose. This madman posture can be beneficial to creating and reinforcing fears and doubts among adversaries, real or potential. In this case perhaps the big players in the region, Saudi Arabia and Iran, whose potential rapprochement, which has been going on now for almost a year, is doubtless a very frightening prospect in Washington. Well, we don't have documentary evidence, so that's speculation. But I think it's not unreasonable. Well there's a lot to say about all these topics (and these are things I'm just mentioning) and related aspects of the post-war global system that I haven't even mentioned. But let me just leave it as something to think about and turn to something related: namely, the institutional structures, the institutional framework that was designed for world order 50 years ago, and how it's fared, and what it looks like today. The institutional structure had three basic components. One was an international political order - that's articulated in the United Nations Charter. A second part was concerned with human rights and the norms for the behavior of governments towards their citizens - that's the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. (Its 50th anniversary will be celebrated, or maybe mourned, in December 1998.) The third component was an international economic order. That's the Bretton Woods system, as it's called, designed by the United States and Great Britain, the global manager and the junior partner. I want to talk mostly about the third, but a few words about the first two. The first, the international political order, (essentially the UN Charter) that's based on a very simple, straightforward principle, and elaborated in various ways. The principle is that the threat or use of force in international affairs is disallowed, unacceptable, has to be barred totally, with two exceptions. One exception is when the threat or use of force is specifically authorized by the Security Council after the Security Council determines that peaceful means have failed. The second is the famous Article 51, which says that nothing in this Charter abrogates the right of self-defence against armed attack until the Security Council acts. That's a rather narrow and specific notion. It means, for example, that if Cuban armies invade the United States, the United States is supposed to notify the Security Council and then, until the Security Council has a chance to do something about this terrible threat, it's allowed to defend itself in anyway that's necessary. Whether that example is hypothetical or not depends on what you want to believe. The Cuban threat to the United States was recently downgraded by the Pentagon, so we don't have to tremble in total fear anymore. That elicited a good deal of anger in Congress and the conclusion was rejected by the White House, which invoked Cuba's threat to the national security and existence of the United States, just a few months ago, in the course of rejecting World Trade Organization jurisdiction when the European Union protested before the WTO gross U.S. violations of trade agreements and international law that had already been condemned by just about every international agency, including even the normally quite compliant Organization of American States. So, depending on where you sit, that example was real or hypothetical, but whatever it is, that's the exception permitted by the UN Charter by the framework of political order and received international law. And those are the only exceptions to the threat or use of force. Now of course there is no enforcement mechanism - this has to be by acceptance. There is in fact an enforcement mechanism, namely the great powers, and to be realistic exactly one of them, namely the United States, so that's the enforcement mechanism. But that suffices to show that the whole system is null and void because the United States rejects the principles out of hand. It rejects them both in practice and in fact in doctrine. There's no need to waste time on the practice in the past half century; the bombing of a pharmaceutical plant in the Sudan a couple of weeks ago is a recent illustration but one that's completely trivial in historical context, though I suppose that terrorist destruction of half of the medical supplies and fertilizers in the United States might be taken a shade more seriously. Whatever the practice may be, and you can know that perfectly well, or should, what's interesting about the recent years is that official doctrine expresses with great clarity and precision the utter contempt for the principles of world order that are of course grandly proclaimed ** when they serve some power interest. This has been going on since the Reagan years and it is a change, a doctrinal change; you might say it's a change toward greater honesty. Anyhow, it's a change. Since the Reagan years the United States has officially reinterpreted the Article 51, the crucial article, to justify its repeated reliance on force. It has held that Article 51, I'm quoting actually, authorizes self-defence against future attack. Article 51 permits the United States to defend its interests. This became even more ludicrous in the Clinton years. It was all formulated rather straightforwardly by Ambassador Albright, now Secretary of State, when she informed the UN Security Council, which was then refusing to go along with some U.S. demands about Iraq…she informed the Security Council that the United States will act "multilaterally when we can, unilaterally when we must in an area important for our interests." That means unconstrained by the world court which had already been dismissed as irrelevant 10 years earlier by the most solemn treaty obligations, the foundations of world order, and so on. I stress that the only innovation in all of this in the past 15 years is that contempt for these high principles is now openly proclaimed, with the acquiescence and the applause of the educated classes - that's a change. But it serves to indicate where the foundations of world order stand after 50 years. In brief, the United Nations and its Charter are fine when they serve as an instrument of power, otherwise the decisions and the condemnations are not even worth reporting, and they are not reported, let alone obeying. Incidentally, you've been following I'm sure the recent debate about founding an international criminal court on war crimes and as you know the United States, essentially alone refused to go along with that. U.S. opposition is effectively a veto when the General Assembly votes 151 to 1 on something (or 2 if the U.S. picks up a client state). That amounts to a veto, just for straight power reasons - nothing obscure about it. And this effectively vetoes the criminal court on war crimes. The official argument that was given by the Clinton administration and Congress was that an international tribunal might carry out frivolous prosecution of U.S. soldiers engaged in peacekeeping operations. That's not very credible, especially if you look at the U.S. role; the U.S. is mostly disqualified from peacekeeping operations - that's literally true. The reason is because it has a very unusual, maybe unique, military doctrine and that is that no military forces are permitted to come under any threat; so if there is any threat at all, they are supposed to react with overwhelming force and that means that in any situation that involves civilians, you know, anything short of total war, the U.S. military simply can't be deployed and in fact isn't if you look at the peacekeeping operations. So that's not a plausible argument, but there are other ones that are plausible and are barely beneath the surface, and that is the very likely concern that an independent judicial inquiry, if it existed, might, as it should, move up the chain of command and that's going to lead it very soon to pretty high places, including the White House. That would be true whether the issue is Indochina or Central America and Panama or Somalia or other exploits. [to be continued...] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ a political discussion forum - •••@••.••• To subscribe, send any message to •••@••.••• A public service of Citizens for a Democratic Renaissance (mailto:•••@••.••• http://cyberjournal.org) ---------------------------------------------------------- Non-commercial reposting is hereby approved, but please include the sig up through this paragraph and retain any internal credits and copyright notices. .--------------------------------------------------------- To see the index of the cj archives, send any message to: •••@••.••• To subscribe to our activists list, send any message to: •••@••.••• Help create the Movement for a Democratic Rensaissance ---------------------------------------------- crafted in Ireland by rkm ----------------------------------- A community will evolve only when the people control their means of communication. -- Frantz Fanon
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