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'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx

Condoleezza Rice defends empire « Previous | |Next »
February 25, 2007

Since 1989, the end of the cold war left has seen the United States become the "sole superpower" in th world of nations. This is usually interpreted in terms of a benevolent American world hegemony or empire—a Pax Americana, and this understanding is assumed, in one or another form, in policy and political circles.The professional foreign policy community assumes that the international system is "naturally" headed toward an eventual American-led consolidation of democratic authority over international affairs.

William Pfaff in Manifest Destiny: A New Direction for America in the New York Review of Books says that he most coherent and plausible official articulation of such reasoning was offered in the summer of 2003 by Condoleezza Rice, then President Bush's national security adviser, speaking in London at the annual meeting of the International Institute for Strategic Studies.
Pfaff say that Rice argued that:

...the time had come to discard the system of balance of power among sovereign states established by the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. The Westphalian settlement ended the wars of religion by establishing the principles of religious tolerance and absolute state sovereignty. The UN is a faulty embodiment of international authority because it is an indiscriminate assembly of all the governments of the world, and should, she argued, be replaced as the ultimate world authority by an alliance or coalition of the democracies.

Is the Coalition of the Willing in Iraq one such alliance? As Pfaff points out the system of a power balance was a response to the rise of nation-states of varying weight and ambition, and was motivated by the need to preserve their independence and protect their national interests.They "balanced" their relations and alliances with others in order to contain rival interests and conflicting ambitions.

Pfaff says that Rice also told the institute's members that the time had come to reject ideas of multipolarity and balance of power in international relations:

This was a reference to French and other arguments in favor of an international system in which a number of states or groups of states (like the EU) act autonomously, serving as counterweights to American power. It followed the controversy earlier that year over the UN Security Council's failure to authorize the US invasion of Iraq. In the past, she said, balance of power may have "sustained the absence of war" but did not promote an enduring peace. "Multipolarity," she continued, "is a theory of rivalry; of competing interests—and at its worst, competing values. We have tried this before. It led to the Great War...."

If you reject balance of power then the only apparent alternative is submission of all to a dominant power--that of the US.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 5:05 AM | | Comments (1)
Comments

Comments

It is also a rejection of pluralism and international liberalism. Power has always defined relations between nation-states, but international liberalism's hope that open communication and national morality could define relations is ignored. It is the 'best man' thesis taken to an international level.