About what if it aint the "end of history" (a very TETT thought this) hardly even the beginning... about what if, dreadful though the mad mullahs are, they're just a side-show... but not in a Power of Nightmares kind of way more your everyday, historical sort, just as back in 1905 the UK was battling Johnny Boer and still pointing most of its guns across the Channel in the direction of La Frog...
And these thoughts percolated with headlines about VJ Day (I was on the Tube by now) and the victory of the democracies over dictatorship... two dictatorships at any rate... and hopes for democracy in Iraq... and I thought...
Are we missing a trick here? Sure we just love those cheap Chinese trousers, as "Two Brains" pointed out, but who exactly are we dealing with? And isn't our avarice for trousers blinding us to the fact that they are produced by a dictatorship that ruthlessly crushes desent? And doesn't this avarice, which will ultimately, as the Pithy Lady pointed out, extend to cut price higher quality goods like plus fours and other specialist trousers currently being produced at home, lead to the destabilisation of our own economy, even democracy?
Were the Chinese simply turning Clausewitz's dictum on its head and conducting war by other means? Were they playing us at our own game, recognising that our greed would forego any democratic demands? Would we a century hence wake up within a society that had bowed to the Metropolis-like logic that the only way to compete in the trouser market was to run our society the "Chinese" way? Was this the masterplan of "Two Brains" and his Chinese backers, for all his silky talk of free trousers for the poor?
And had dashing, dynamic EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson spotted this terrifying trend and was even now battling against it, the un-sung hero of liberty, democracy, and the world's working class?
Go ahead and sneer, but it aint over till it's over... Or as the Chairman might say, see above.
Will history remember Mandy's lonely struggle on behalf of unaffordable trousers and democracy?
2 comments:
Know where you're coming from but in short 'no' - Mandy personally argued AGAINST ALL QUOTAS ON CHINA - he admits this freely (he did so most recently in a Radio 4 interview last weekend) as a sort of 'look it wasn't my idea so don't blame me for this huge naked arsed chav of a fuck-up' kind of excuse.
This is because he believes that democracy is best, and almost SOLELY best, promoted by FREE TRADE and ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT - in other words he actually believes what the US administration says it believes (but ignores when it comes to furniture, clothes, steel, bananas or more or less anything which is produced by a corporation with a few senators on the payroll).
Some really perverse Machiavells belive he allowed it to f**k up on purpose to make a point to those rotten little protectionists in the European south who are vainly trying to save their textile industries. Mandy has been at war with them for sometime.
Oddly enough however he has recently been promoting some vaguely sensible (on the surface) ideas about a larger European trade bloc expanding into the middle east and Africa, though what purpose a genuine free trade area would serve in a world of restrictive tarrifs it is intriguing to ask. I suppose it would be a huge area of opportunity for multi-national corporations who might like an ex-trade commisasioner on their boards.
This reminds me of the late Robin Cook's comment (made in January this year) that Tony Blair was generally so impressed by successful people that he frequently confused the best interests of such people and the organisations they represented with the public good. Mandelsson has never been guilty of this.
He simply identified with them so strongly that he felt he deserved whatever they had for himself, from power to power-houses (so as to speak). Having been caught out for borrowing from those who were no longer his political friends (Geoff Robinson the Gordon backer), to promote the appearance of success in the power-housing area, it is most unlikely that Peter will ever again leave such things to chance.
As for his plus-fours I can't even go there but suffice to say he is unlikely to be heading for the Primark bargain bin any time soon...
On your more general point it is an interesting question how we should view China's expanded international trade. Ultimately I believe that democratic tendencies are more likely to flourish in an economically developed China but that said there are cultural and historical factors to take account of. China in its modern form is a very recent creation but, then again, so is most of Asia, including modern Japan.
I am also reminded about a Reception at the Bank of China in the early 90's where much hilarity was caused by a discussion of how the Americans would feel about their suspicious and restrictive trade practices with China when the Chinese economy was larger and more powerful than theirs.
One wag suggested that they might have to cut themselves off from the world economic order to protect their retro-national-capitalist-protectionist model (in a curious historical distorted mirror image of the ultra-maoist tendencies of China itself at the height of the Cultural Revolution and to a greater extent of Pol Pot's Cambodia).
In essence the Chinese speaker was suggesting that he and his colleagues had a better understanding of the international nature of capital and the likely development of this than most American politicians.
The irony is that the Bank of China is now probably one of the Chinese corporate bodies who own vast swathes of American debt and through this effectively control the global value of the US economy. The crazy thing about trade however is that everyone needs markets so there is rarely an incentive to pull the proverbial trigger and destroy the economy of a competitor - far better to simply own it - preferably on the basis of cheap acquisition.
Of course if Chinese capital were to become too democratic and individual some Chinese corporate bodies might cease to share the interests of their country and the majority of their countrymen.
This would mean that they could have an interest in quietly pulling a few smaller triggers, THEN America's time as a global economic backwater might just start to come to pass. While this may seem a fairly left-field projection just this month, in the article 'One foot in the Third World' The Ecologist speculates that, 'If the US economy carries on its current decline, it will be a Third World country by 2024.'
see: http://www.theecologist.org/current.asp
Also worth reading is the Aspartame article which is making me think twice about my addiction to Diet Coke - from bio-weapon to mass-consumption sweetener in less than lifetime - now that's what I call product re-positioning ...yee-hah!
It only remains to say 'Nixon in China' - tricky yes, stupid no; and to reflect that it is the US attitude that it makes its own rules because, goddamit capitalism is our ball and we decide the rules and who gets to play by which ones; which always prompts old Mr Vidal to view the US (from Ravello) as an empire in decay, rather than a global superpower on the up.
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