To judge from the enthusiastic, largely North American-owned British press, Britain standing shoulder to shoulder with the United States in Afghanistan meant major military involvement. In fact, the aircraft bombing targets there have been exclusively American. The British contribution has been some Tomahawk missiles, fired from one British submarine.
As Chancellor Schröder said to the Bundestag on Oct. 18, the paramount need is for a foreign and security strategy for the European Union as a whole. It is as a bloc acting together that Europe can count, not by the leaders of individual member states strutting their stuff on the world stage.
Hardly anyone is against British participation in European backing for the United States. But the cry will increasingly be heard that Tony Blair should spend more time on the problems of ordinary people and less on grandstanding around the world masquerading as President of the Universe.
http://www.iht.com/articles/36633.htm
This spiteful attack is by a writer with an English name but who is nevertheless described as a former representative of the European Commission in Washington. He contributed this comment to the International Herald Tribune.
This is a revealing insight into an area of politics often neglected by those whose marxism gets no further than a reading of State and Revolution: the question of inter-imperialist rivalry. Although nowadays it will only lead to intermittent trade wars, and it is difficult to detect, it is none the less real and an important engine of the unfolding of world politics.
Such an explicit attack on Blair in the interests of European finance capital, can only take place because the author is two handshakes away from Schroeder and Jospin: he is retired, but his ideas are not so distant from his old colleagues who are still employed by committees answerable to Schroeder and Jospin, as to exile him from these circles. Indeed the article will have been pitched at a level, where some of his circle will congratulate him on his boldness, and his creativity in getting it into circulation in a North American owned paper, and one unlikely to be intimidated by Alistair Campbell.
The existence of inter-imperialist contradictions in this form illustrates that we are progressing from the era of imperialism to the era of Empire: they are manifested and resolved by means other than outright war: by skirmishing in a larger, global, civil society, to represent different inter-penetrating constituencies of interest.
There is more than a little truth in what the critic says, not least in the trifling material contribution of the Brits to the current phase of the war in Afghanistan. But Blair and Campbell can finesse all this. Blair is canny enough to know he could not expect to become President of the Universe. But he is correct in sensing that someone will be, at least President of the World, and that some of the political platform on which such a person will stand, will be similar to the pitch that Blair made in September.
Chris Burford
London
