WHAT then continues to sustain the globalisation drive in the face of the growing financial crisis propelled by such a long economic downturn? Some commentators glibly talk of technology and especially the dramatic rise of what has come to be known as the new economy. But the euphoria seems to be evaporating faster than it grew. After all the information- and knowledge-based new economy, though it added a lot of gloss to the brick-and-mortar old economy and brought about dramatic changes in certain operational respects, could by no means replace the latter. We hear tall talks about e-commerce, but nobody has heard about e-production! The new economy people may talk about ICE (information-communication-entertainment) and the speculators may breathe FIRE (finance-insurance-real estates), but the growing economic crisis is once again tearing asunder the veil of appearance, the fetish of what Marx called ‘fictitious capital’, to reveal the disquiet in the backyard of manufacturing.

At the end of the day, the sustenance of globalisation depends on power and particularly on the military might of the world’s lone superpower or hyper-power, as the French call it, the United States. The noted American journalist and the celebrated author of the pro-globalisation bestseller, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, Thomas Friedman ends his book with “the unique role the United States plays, and needs to keep playing, in stabilizing” the new system of globalisation. Friedman is quite emphatic in his defence of the centrality of the US superpower to the gobalisation project. “Sustainable globalisation,” he tells us, “requires a stable power structure, and no country is more essential for this than the United States. All the Internet and other technologies that Silicon Valley is designing to carry digital voices, videos and data around the world, all the trade and financial integration it is promoting through its innovations, and all the wealth this is generating, are happening in a world stabilized by a benign superpower, with its capital in Washington, D.C. ... The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist.”

Friedman would of course like us to believe that “America truly is the ultimate benign hegemon and reluctant enforcer.” He is afraid that if the remains hidden for too long, if America takes this ‘reluctance’ too far, it would threaten the stability of the whole globalisation system. He therefore calls for more vigorous US intervention and quite naturally after the bombings began in Afghanistan, he exclaimed “Give war a chance”.

Even though the trajectory of events unfolding since September 11 does not quite coincide with the trajectory of the ongoing economic crisis and anti-globalisation protests, the hidden fist has nevertheless come out into the open and the link between Kabul and Doha, between the US-led bombing of Afghanistan and the bulldozing of the third world at the recent WTO ministerial summit is not difficult to understand. Crisis and war have once again come together, the recession-hit US economy and the Western world is once again seeking a way out of the crisis through war and destruction. We may recall Galbraith’s keen observation about the Great Depression: the depression had never really ended, it just merged into the war.

The unfolding turn of events has forced even the most ardent advocate of globalisation to talk about its uncertain future. More and more people are drawing rather alarmist parallels to how previous rounds of closer economic integration and capitalist expansion had produced sharp competition and ‘nationalist backlash’ leading to the eruption of inter-imperialist wars. In his famous book The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000, Professor Paul M Kennedy of Yale University draws the picture of a US in decline. Like the earlier Spanish, French and British empires, the American empire is also slated to decline because of its own imperial overreaching, warns the professor. Soros says he doubts if the global capitalist economy would once again be plunged into another world war (while financial crises had caused severe economic dislocation and decline, the actual collapse of previous rounds of globalisation, he points out, was triggered by political and military developments), but nevertheless he sees intense instability ahead.