Submitted by Pachamama
A total of 57 countries have joined AIIB as its founding members, China has said, throwing together countries as diverse as Iran, Israel, Britain and Laos.Among the Group of Seven (G7) industrialized countries, the United States, Japan and Canada remain absentees – Reuters
Search as we may, it is virtually impossible to find any conversations about portentous global events. Events which are more likely than not to radically change local or regional, political, economic, equations, for better or worse. Global events that go beyond the regular humdrum of local political rivalries, local food fights, needing some kind of close management. Local rivalries always seem to peter out into a muchness of a muchness, lacking the ‘germ’ to influence global events.
As anthropologists, a thousand years from now, we shall be left in wonder as to the nature of the 21st century Caribbean mind. We will have to try to understand how a purportedly education people could have interested themselves in things that matter little while ignoring the most important developments. ‘Understand how the only regional response to the externally-imposed politics of austerity would be a tepid ‘reparations’, not restitution, foray.
Our intellectual slumber comes at a time when the Chinese have advanced their grand empire building designs for a ‘New Silk Road’. It is a project which will be one of the central ideas around a China-Russia-India-BRICS push to transform the world from its Anglo-American domination. A project which lays claims to what Brzezinski called ‘the stupendous prize’ of Central Asia. Chinese President Xi’s recent visit to Kazakhstan, for example, sought to further this central plank of a very different kind of world order. For some, ‘The Great Game” is over and the West are the losers, and they, themselves, are coming to know this!
The Silk Road project is to link most of Asia to Europe. It passes through China, India, Japan, Russia, The ‘Stans’ of Central Asia, Iran, Iraq, Syria, into the Mediterranean, and on to Italy. Even the Suez Canal and other ports will be connected. In the old days Amexem used to be part of Asia. There are other links into the main trade artery as well. This massive project is the reason for the Western sponsored ‘War of Terror’ and the phony Sunni/Shite divide as supported by Turkey and Saudi Arabia, countries whose notional influence in world affairs are threatened.
Of course, the ‘upstarts’ have other grand ideas, like the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) which is to replace the World Bank and the IMF. There are several studies which show that the Asian Tigers’ absence of relationships with the World Bank and the IMF, when compared to African or Caribbean countries show opposite results. The Tigers were able to develop without burdensome debt while the latter are still embroiled in unrepayable debt and an absence of the development proposed.
The use of national currencies by the challengers will sooner or later morphed into a single monetary unit which will displace the US dollar in the settlement of international accounts, reserve currency. Indeed, the AIIB and its sister, a new reserve currency, were always meant to be conjoined. The birth of these twins will continue to be unpleasant for the Anglophiles.
There can be no expectation that these ‘young’ lions could sustain perceived unanimity. It is one thing to overthrow the dominant ‘male’, put him under pressures, quite another to subordinate ego to the new leader who separates from the pack. Instead of a multi-polar world, one actor may emerge as hegemon or hyper-power. That scenario can hardly be in the interests of the small countries of the Caribbean.
On the other hand, only the willfully blind could ignore the cultural decay within the Anglo-American landscapes. In the USA there are 70,000 bridges which are unsafe, collapsing. American airports rank 30th in the world. Of the thousands of miles of high speed rail in the world not ‘one single’ mile is with the USA. The powers that be have been, for decades, talking about these national maladies but there is and will never be funding to ‘rebuild America’. While the Chinese see massive infrastructure as a means to dominance it is lack of infrastructure which signals the demise of the American global power, at home. Of course, endless ‘development’ of this nature will be less than sustainable. It may however, be a viable means of empire building. The recent construction of many cities in China that remain vacant seems not to have tempered the grand designers of global empire in Beijing or Moscow.
In England, there has been the ominous re-emergence of tolls and the privatization of roadways, at least in debate. For this ‘medieval’ turnpike system to re-emerge when rising countries have built high speed train systems harkens back to antiquity. How is it then possible for the old lions of the Anglo-American Empire to withstand the claim to power from the ‘young’ Asian tigers?
America’s shameful and pending withdrawal from the global stage will not be unlike the British. We remember a British withdrawal under the cloak of a global independence movement. A movement which came out of midair. We now know that it was America’s CIA which quietly put the British under immense pressure to give up their colonial possessions after WW2. They hatched all types of plots to pressure the British. The Americans could then give us an empire without any responsibilities for its colonial subjects. This was the result of their perceived victory during WW2.
Like any dying empire, at times, there will be signs as though to instigate a fight, efforts to cling on. The Clintons have been, for years, trying to position Haiti as the ‘dollar a day’ labour camp for the American capitalists, with little success. The thinking is that Haiti could be the factory which replaces cheap goods from Asia nearer to America’s shores, away from a theater which China controls or could easily control. Amid death pangs, there is the rise of the TPP and other multilateral initiatives to stymie the advance of the new powers and confuse others. Meanwhile, their best friends in Europe are trying to avoid war and are themselves founding members of the AIIB.
Having lost The Korean War, The Vietnam War, The Iraq War and The Global War of Terror, the USA’s fallback position was for global chaos as a means to extend dominance. Given John Kerry’s recent visit to Russia and the tenor of public comments by himself and Foreign Minister Viktorovich Lavrov it would appear that the Americans have no appetite for a military engagement of Russian over Ukraine. American policies over Cuba and Iran follow a similar trajectory. These speak to a broken back country unable and unwilling to make a mark in global affairs and enforce that line. An empire asking others to fight wars on its behalf.`
And how are we in the Caribbean to read these developments? How can our islands, our region, are to engage these potentially menacing developments? What does this possibly threatening new world order hold for us, as a people? How are we to conceive of a world where English is not the dominant language? How can we even approach these questions in the absence of plans of our own, hundred-year plans?
Maybe we are not to worry about these questions and continue to reside within a ‘locus of dependence’. Maybe we have already started to shift dependence from the Anglo-Americans to the Chinese. The old pathologies of dependence maybe useless, as a crutch, in a system where there is no single global centre. That the ‘cultural Philistines’ running these islands have landed us here or waiting for someone’s programme to guide us may indeed suggest revolution as a necessary pre-condition.
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