Fractures and Faultlines in the Global Political Economy

THE MAKING OF THE 'WEST' AND THE CONTENDER STATE CHALLENGE

In Third World countries I felt I had dropped into the past, and I had never accepted the notion of timelessness anywhere. Most countries had specific years. In Turkey it was always 1952, in Malaysia 1937; Afghanistan was 1910 and Bolivia 1949. It is twenty years ago in the Soviet Union, ten in Norway, five in France. It is always last year in Australia and next week in Japan. Britain and the United States were the present — but the present contains the future.

Paul Theroux, The Kingdom by the Sea, 1984

In order to study foreign relations properly, one has to abandon the Eurocentric mindset; but to understand global rivalries in today's world, we must first investigate the West and its specific history. This is how I will approach the subject matter in this study. I begin by looking at the origins and early development of the relationship between the emerging English-speaking realm and its continental rivals.

The Anglo-French antagonism that will serve as the core structure of our analysis was grafted on late-medieval contests within a ruling class of warriors-landowners on both sides of the Channel. Relations of exploitation and struggles over living space are primordial here; 'national' entities only emerged after centuries of fighting over land occupancy and income. Scandinavian Vikings had raided the British Isles since the ninth century, subduing the Saxons and others wherever they settled. In 1066, England was integrated again into Romanised, feudal Europe by the Duke of Normandy, William the Conqueror (himself a descendant of Viking corsairs). The Norman kings of England retained large tracts of territory in France; the Hundred Years' War in the fourteenth century merely saw the most intense fighting in a protracted struggle over further redistribution. Crucially, however, England became a unified entity right from the conquest. France, with a population six times as large, only came into its own in the mid-fifteenth century, when it made peace with Burgundy, then an ally of the English monarchy. In 1558, England finally surrendered its last holdout, Calais. This absolved the state of having to fight costly land wars and kept taxes on its subjects within negotiable limits.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, social and political development acquired a new cohesion and direction as a democratic revolution. Affecting all of northwest Europe, the democratic revolution evolved through struggles against feudal-aristocratic rule, royal absolutism and the hold of the Roman Catholic church on spiritual and cultural life. Its first, bourgeois, phases — the Reformation and the Enlightenment — entailed the reordering of the form of the state and its relationship with society in ways suiting the needs of the commercialising landlords, merchants and the artisans of the towns. The English and the French revolutions are the defining moments in this process, although even in those epoch-making events the 'bourgeoisie' was never a cohesive class but an amalgam of diverse social forces loosely united by urban residence and commercial activity and outlook. Generally the bourgeoisie in Europe was averse to radical political change because their businesses tended to be part of a system of royal or feudal monopolies and licences. Only when the privilege-granting authority (prince or city) could no longer accommodate an expansion of their field of activity and/ or mental horizon would elements from the bourgeoisie be drawn into the struggles erupting from religious disputes, popular discontent, or fights among different sections of the nobility.

The democratic revolution eventually resulted in parliamentary states with a unified national economy. But this was achieved only after a series of separate revolts and restorations, which moreover tended to be disjointed, spread across different societies as 'moments' of the larger transformation. Political revolutions sent their waves of refugees, ideas, agents and armies across borders into other societies, where they activated social forces that were waiting or lay dormant, thus reconnecting processes of change into a single flow. In this sense the long-term emancipation and formation of the bourgeoisie as a class and the revolutionary convulsions of the Reformation and Enlightenment epochs merged into one comprehensive process. However, the unevenly timed capture of state power in the democratic revolution, and the varying degrees to which the ascendant bourgeoisie was involved in it, also shaped the distribution of geopolitical space. In the wars of religion on the continent and in the British Isles, different patterns of state/society organisation and foreign involvement became apparent for the first time. Hence the bourgeois phase of the democratic revolution can be argued to have created the heartland/contender state structure, which has, after the Glorious Revolution of 1688, over-determined every democratic revolution. Let us look at this in some detail.

The North Atlantic Aspect of the Reformation

The Reformation was the first stage of the democratic revolution in Europe. It had the effect, in the words of Edmund Burke, 'of introducing other interests into all countries than those which arose from their locality and natural circumstances' — a shift of spatial coordinates primarily induced by the growth of commerce and private property, enclosure and displacement. The outcomes of the Reformation entailed major geopolitical consequences: the partition of the German and Spanish empires along confessional lines, and, crucially, the establishment of an English-speaking 'West'.

Protestantism is rooted in the idea of an unmediated covenant with God. Thus, in the context of Christianity, it articulates the rise of individualism, a key aspect of the rise of a commercially minded bourgeoisie. Indeed, till today Protestant Christianity accompanies the spread of capital across the globe, with the militant evangelism of both very much in step with each other. Back in the sixteenth century, the Lutheran reformation triggered the Peasant War and the revolution of the princes in Germany, ripping up the empire; a settlement was reached in 1555 by the Peace of Augsburg. Meanwhile, in England Henry VIII made himself the head of a separate Anglican church through the Act of Supremacy of 1534, dividing the landholdings of the church of Rome among his barons. If we have to define these events...