In Message Sun, 27 Feb 1994 15:40:30 -0800, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
>Robert Kaplan's, "The Coming Anarchy," in Atlantic Monthly,
>February 1994 issue is the most important single article I've
>read for many years. Despite the article's obvious limitations
>as economic, social, political, and ecological theory, and
>as someone who doesn't recommend current events readings
>very often, I urge you all to study this article, hopefully
>with the idea of getting a discussion going about it.
>You won't be sorry!
>Jim O'Connor
OK, Jim, I'll bite! I've finally managed to get to read the article
--- and, to my surprise, don't share your reaction. On the other hand, I
do think the article is important because of its message *and* reception.
I confess that I was a bit wary when I first glanced at the piece because
it had been passed on (quite excitedly) by a not especially progressive
relative. It was only, however, this weekend-- when the Vancouver Sun
(which, with the exception of one columnist, has been overwhelmingly
reactionary on matters relating to the environment and progressive issues
in general) began a prominently-featured series of articles drawn from the
original Kaplan piece-- that I began to look more closely at the argument.
What's Kaplan saying? Well, after describing the chaos, lawlessness,
anarchy of West Africa (with particular reference to Sierra Leone), he
tells us *de te fabula narratur!*: "West Africa is becoming *the* symbol
of worldwide demographic, environmental, and societal stress, in which
criminal anarchy emerges as the real 'strategic' danger.Disease, over-
population, unprovoked crime, scarcity of resources...[etc] are now most
tellingly demonstrated through a West African prism. West Africa provides
an appropriate introduction to the issues, often extremely unpleasant
to discuss, that will soon confront our civilization." (*Our* civilization!
---as if West Africa had nothing to do with "our civilization"!)
And, that's the message that is grabbing readers--- the view that
the next 50 years will be West Africa (the Balkans,etc) writ large, that
it will be a story of wars of "communal survival, aggravated or, in many
cases, caused by environmental scarcity." But, the *real* hook is that
it will not be something happening out *there*; it will also be here--- in
"our civilization". "As crime continues to grow in our cities and the
ability of state governments and criminal-justice systems to protect
their citizens diminishes," crime and war become indistinguishable.
It is a familiar lament (invoking, among others, Saul Bellow and Samuel
Huntington)--- "The signs [of America's transformation beginning in the
60s] hardly need belaboring: racial polarity, educational dysfunction,
social fragmentation of many and various kinds."
And, why is it all happening? Overpopulation, environmental scarcity
and degradation, the decline of the nation-state seem to be the main
explanation for Kaplan. (Nothing about capitalism? the structural
adjustment programmes of the IMF and World Bank? Imperialism? Globalisation
of poverty?) So, with this message and analysis, what is the reader to
conclude is to be done? Population control? A quarantining of third
world genocide (which Samir Amin has described for years)? Fortress
Suburbia? A return to "traditional American values"? JIM, HOW CAN YOU
SAY THIS IS THE MOST IMPORTANT SINGLE ARTICLE YOU HAVE READ FOR YEARS?!
Hope I've provoked you (and other penners).
cheers,
mike
Mike Lebowitz, Economics Dept.,Simon Fraser University
Burnaby,B.C., Canada V5A 1S6
Office: (604) 291-3508 or 291-4669
Home: (604) 255-0382
Lasqueti Island refuge: Lasqueti Island, B.C. Canada V0R 2J0
(604) 333-8810
e-mail:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
