Foreword 1 Introduction
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Notes Foreword 1. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeffrey-rubin/what-will-a-greek-default_b _1521461.html. 2. Graciela Laura Kaminsky and Pablo Vega-García, ‘Varieties of Sovereign Crises: Latin America, 1820–1931’ Department of Economics, George Washington University and NBER, June 2012, www.crei.cat/conferences/ief-workshop/ Vega.pdf. 3. Eurostat’s figures of Richest & Poorest NUTS-2 Regions at GDP PPP 2009. NUTS stands for Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics. 1 Introduction 1. Lack of a ‘global fault-lines’ perspective in the early 1990s had led one of us to see the collapse of the Greek political system as imminent, because the elements factored into the analysis were mainly economic and of domes- tic political origin, overlooking global security and geo-political implications brought to bear upon Greece following the end of the Cold War, a fact which gave a lease of life to Greece’s political system for another 15 years; see, Vassilis K. Fouskas (1995) Populism and Modernisation: The Exhaustion of the Third Hellenic Republic, 1974–94 (Athens: Ideokinissi). 2. Ibid., pp. 57 ff. in which an analysis of Leninism as a continuation of Russian populist tradition towards power is made, followed by Lenin’s social demo- cratic turn after the Bolsheviks assumed power in 1917 (the ‘tax in kind’, electrification, etc.). This approach to Leninism, that is, Lenin’s own trans- formation from a radical semi-populist Marxist to a social democrat has been conveniently ignored by all ‘Communist’ or ‘Radical’ parties across the world to date. 3. Norberto Bobbio (1978) Compromesso e alternanza nel sistema politico italiano (Roma: Mondo Operaio/Edizioni Avanti!) p. 29. 4. This was sensed by Nikos Beloyiannis in a book on the history of Greece’s foreign borrowing and dependence, which he must have finished in the first part of the 1940s; see, Nicos Beloyiannis (2010) The Foreign Capital in Greece (Athens: Agra), especially the section of the book that discusses when ‘a loan is good and bad’, pp. 325–33. Using a number of mainstream Greek economists of the inter-war period, such as Xenophon Zolotas, Beloyiannis also observes how foreign loans increased the tax burden on the Greek citizen. 5. For instance, this is the case with John Mearsheimer (2001) The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: Norton). 6. Karl Marx (1857–58/1973) Grundrisse (Harmondsworth: Penguin) p. 90. 192 Notes 193 7. A typical example of positivist methodology in the field of International Rela- tions (IR) is the work by Stephen Van Evera (1997) Guide to Methods for Students of Political Science (Ithaca: Cornell University Press). 2 The Sinews of Capital and the Disintegrative Logics of Euro-Atlanticism 1. V.I. Lenin (1917/2008) Imperialism. The Highest Stage of Capitalism (New York: International Publishers), pp. 96–7. The methodological similarities of Lenin’s forms of thought with realist IR scholarship are striking. We discuss these similarities in more detail later. 2. Of paramount importance here is the work by Richard Peet (2007) Unholy Trinity (London: Zed Books). 3. The paternity of hub-and-spoke (informal) American neo-imperialism, as opposed to the formal European empires before World War II, can be traced back to the famous NSC-68 document put together by Paul Nitze’s national security team in March 1950. For a thorough discussion on how Paul Nitze and Dean Acheson outflanked George Keenan’s notion of ‘containment’ of the Soviet threat with the idea of US primacy within the capitalist world based on hub-and-spoke arrangements, see Vassilis K. Fouskas and Bülent Gökay (2005) The New American Imperialism; Bush’s War on Terror and Blood for Oil (Connecticut: Praeger), Chapter 2. 4. Josef Jossef (1997) ‘How America does it’, Foreign Affairs, v. 76, n. 4, September–October, pp. 16–17, 21. 5. From this perspective, the debate between John Mearsheimer and Zbigniew Brzezinski reads with interest. See, ‘Clash of the titans’, Foreign Policy,5Jan- uary 2005 www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2005/01/05/clash_of_the_titans (accessed on 1 July 2012). Brzezinski takes sides with the historians’ claim ‘we cannot predict the future’, whereas Mearsheimer takes sides with ‘offensive realism’s’ typical thesis that war is unavoidable not just when the balance of power is destroyed (a claim put forth by ‘defensive realists’, such as Kenneth Waltz), but because great powers want always to maximize their power in the system – he makes a case about the unavoidable rise of China in global affairs, a rise that is bound to be translated into military power in the not too distant future. 6. Nicos Poulantzas (1978), L’Etat, le pouvoir, le socialisme (Paris: PUF), p. 24. 7. Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin (2012), The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire (London: Verso) p. 3. 8. The key text on the fiscal crisis of the state in the 1960s and early 1970s is by James O’Connor (1973), The Fiscal Crisis of the State (New York: St. Martin’s Press). O’Connor refers basically to the US state, but its relevance to all other states of the capitalist core is evident. 9. It is precisely class analysis that is lacking in certain variants of construc- tivism that discuss the agency/structure binary in IR theory via Anthony Giddens’ ‘structuration’ theory – see, for instance, Alexander Wendt (1987), ‘The agent-structure problem in international relations theory’, International Organisation, v. 41, n. 3, pp. 335–70. 194 Notes 10. The term ‘globalization/financialization’ applies, primarily but not exclu- sively, to the external environment of the state. The term ‘neo-liberalism’ applies, primarily but not exclusively, to the domestic environment of the state. For further analysis, both historical and theoretical, and definitions see Vassilis K. Fouskas and Bülent Gökay (2012), The Fall of the US Empire; Global Fault-lines and the Shifting Imperial Order (London: Pluto Press), Chapters 1–4. 11. Karl Polanyi (1944/2001), The Great Transformation: The Political and Eco- nomic Origins of our Time (Boston: Beacon press), pp. 145, 147. In the event, this is Polanyi’s very notion of ‘double movement’. Capitalism, according to Polanyi, is constituted along two opposing movements: the liberal/free mar- ket movement and the state-led movement that resists the disembedding of the economy from politics, religion and social relations. This is, in our view, erroneous, because the state, whether liberal or Keynesian, is always embedded in the social/technical division of labour. The state as such does not possess power to embed or disembed into the economy; it draws power from the social relations of production and the social/technical division of labour. Arguably, then, Polanyi does not possess a political theory. 12. David Harvey (2010), The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism (London: Profile Books). 13. The best theoretical discussion on the ‘state of emergency’ comes from the works of Carl Schmidt and Giorgio Agamben – see, Carl Schmidt (1922/1985), Political Theology (Cambridge: MIT Press); Giorgio Agamben (2005), State of Exception (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press). Agamben discusses perceptively Schmidt’s position that sovereign is the one who can create a state of emergency, not the one who is said to be so in the state’s Constitution. 14. Nicholas J. Spykman (1938), ‘Geography and foreign policy II’, The American Political Science Review, v. xxxii, n. 2, April, p. 236. Spykman’s ‘rimland theory’, which argued for a control by the United States of Eurasia’s rim- lands (Western Europe, Middle East and South-East Asia), so that it can maintain its global mastery given to it naturally by its geography of the two oceans, had eventually been embraced by key US policy makers and advisers to US presidents. Spykman’s ‘rimland theory’ can be found in his classic America’s Strategy in World Politics. The United States and the Balance of Power, published in 1942 by Harcourt, Brace and Company Inc. On the issue of appreciation of Spykman’s work by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, see Neil Smith (2003), American Empire: Roosevelt’s Geographer and the Prelude to Globalisation (Berkeley: University of California Press). 15. One could argue, for example, that Greece did in fact have a greater geo- strategic significance during the Cold War, which was lost soon after the end of it. As we shall see in detail below, this is not the case. 16. Pantelis Pouliopoulos (1934/1980), Democratic or Socialist Revolution in Greece? (Athens: Protoporiaki Vivliothiki), p. 69. Pouliopoulos was the first translator of the first volume of Capital. Expelled from the party due to his Trotskyist beliefs, Pouliopoulos was executed by the Nazis and fascist troops at Nezero, near Athens, in June 1943. 17. In Capital, Marx defines the relation M-C-M’ as representing a sum of money used to buy a commodity that is resold to obtain a larger sum of money (M’). The relation M-M’ means money lent out at interest to obtain more money, Notes 195 or one currency or financial claim traded for another. The relation C-M-C’ represents a commodity sold for money and buying another, different com- modity, with an equal or higher value (C’). Commodities are repositories of value, which are a crystallization of socially necessary labour time. Value is always social. 18. Karl Marx (1857/1973), Grundrisse (Middlesex: Penguin), p. 852. 19. David Harvey (1982/2006), Limits to Capital (London: Verso), p. 425. 20. Drawing from the work of Joseph Schumpeter, many economists and het- erodox political economists disagree with this claim. Broadly speaking, the argument goes as follows. Schumpeter pioneered a theory of eco- nomic development and value creation through the process of technological change and innovation.