Uni Evi,
Kenal uni jo mbak Tika nan di Deplu?
Iko ambo agiah uni saketek bahan tentang globalisasi sasuai jo bahaso nan
acok uni pakai.
GEOPOLITICAL ASPECTS OF THE WORLD FINANCIAL SYSTEM
(Aleksander Dugin)
1. World reserve currency: its genesis
Question: is the present world reserve currency – the US dollar – the
result of a set of purely economical processes? The univocal answer is: NO.
How did it happen, that just the dollar plays this role?
It is obvious that the evolution of the economy – and especially of the
financial system, the pivot of contemporary economy – goes within a
multi-dimensional context. Let us briefly summarise the stages of the dollar’s rise to
a sovereign position.
2. The stages of the rise of the US
The US began to systemically move to an hegemonic position in the world
market already since 1919. According to the Belgian Luc Michel (Economic
Nationalism Against the World Economy, Elementy, n.4, 1993):
« The first competitors whom they must outpace have been the English,
whose political-economic presence was spread all over the planet. Americans’
operations came one after the other. English military bases disappeared from
Bermudas. Jamaica, Antigua, Bahamas, St.Lucia and St.John’s, to be replaced by
American military bases. The Americans appeared also in Iceland and Greenland,
although those country were formerly within the English sphere of influence.
The US lent England huge loans (the interests on which already amounted to
fabulous sums) in exchange for the access to key financial and trade spheres.
Consolidation of the political alliance to Canada, control upon English
capitals placed at American businesses, infiltration into Singapore, the western
African coast, and up to the Persian Gulf (isle of Bahrain)… The deal even
reached an unprecedented interference in the affairs of a sovereign state –
president Roosevelt’s representative, Harry Hopkins, being present at the English
cabinet confidential sessions.
The “decolonization” process, stimulated by the US, was in fact the way
to establishing the American continental hegemony.
In 1945 the main winner of the world war were the US. Their sole
competitor, the Soviet Union, was exhausted by a five years’ war on her own
territory, and weakened by the loss of million lives. Besides the obvious division of
the world between the US and the USSR, Yalta also meant the “defenestration”
of the European “allies” on the world political scene (what Churchill
stressed). Since that time the US have been the unchallenged dominator in the world
market. They had nothing left to do but reshaping the market to their image
and reaping the greatest benefit ».
« In 1944 all western economists, both liberals and Marxists, forecast an
inevitable crisis of the American industry, linked to the inevitable
restructuring of the economy due to the transition from war to peace. Despite of all
those forecasts, something completely opposite happened. Thanks to the
American economic expansion into Europe and to giant investments outlined in the
Marshall Plan, the US could save their position, and prepare for themselves an
excellent sales market.
The American military-industrial complex, which according to the logic of
economic prognosis should have become a drag on economic and industrial
development, became on the contrary the key factor of success.
Nobody could expect that the post-war period would quickly evolve into
the “cold war”. Taking upon themselves world-wide responsibility for the fight
against communism, the US definitively replaced England in the capitalist
world, making of their military power the main warranty of economic stability.
Thanks to the superiority of the military-industrial complex, the US could
leave once for all behind the last stock exchange crisis of 1929. The
unemployment level decreased by 4.5 times in comparison to the pre-war years; factories
and plants worked at 100% of their productive capacity (before the war:
75%).
Half the world’s profits belonged now exclusively to the US. America
could impose in the world such economic environment as to benefit first of all
herself. Thanks to the “cold war” the US met no moral or political obstacles in
reshaping the world economy in conformity to their own schemes ».
(Dominic Barukh, The Restructuring of the American Industry)
In 1945 the US had reached the goals they set themselves at the beginning
of the XIX century.
One cannot help but recall the words of senator Beveridge, herald of
American imperialism at the end of the XIX century: « Destiny has predetermined
our policies – world trade must be in our hands. Our trade ships cross all the
oceans. The American Law, the American civilisation now reign on all shores,
even those farthest and deep into the darkness of ignorance and barbarism –
but they lay prosper and happy under the check of forces given us by God ».
François Perroux, the eminent French economist, wrote:
« The representatives of neo-classical liberalism lived in the epoch of
forming nations. In the framework of the nation, according to their theory,
economic interest is reduced to the utmost freedom of exchange. In their view
labour division among nations would be in theory the most efficient way to
realise this freedom…. But in practice the concepts of liberalism clash with
economic reality, where an already formed “inequality of structures” does exist;
and because of this inequality the most powerful and stronger nations aim at
securing themselves the greatest economic benefit to the detriment of the
remaining nations ».
3. The geopolitical content of the dollar since 1947
If GEOPOLITICS is responsible for the phenomenon of the dollar’s
globalisation, we must therefore refer to the situation in the “cold war” period
(1949-1991). Because during that period the dollar became what it is now – the
world reserve currency.
Emerging as the GEOPOLITICAL pole of the West, the US especially
exploited mostly in that period the “inequality of structures”. If in the first half
of the century the US gained the United Kingdom’s strategic position by
swapping it for credits – that is, using financial mechanisms – in the “cold war”
era to the solution of the European and Japanese (Asian) problems were
offered not only the Marshall financial plan, but also strategical-military
tutelage. The US became a comprehensive pole, projecting its own structures on two
thirds of the world. The main conceptual element of American geopolitics at
that time was the existence itself of Russia, of the socialist camp.
The “common enemy”, the imperative of defence against potential “Soviet
threat” were central arguments in the organisation of world structures under
US control. Here also lie the foundations of the imperialism of the dollar :
the US rose to the strategic (military) role of protector of non-socialist
countries and issuer of monetary and ideological signs.
It is important to stress that at that time the dollar began to gain a
different quality.
The abolition of the gold standard as a consequence of the stock exchange
crisis of 1929 made the national currency a function of the concrete trade
balance – according to Keynes’ theory and Roosevelt’s “New Deal”. Prosperity
of the “grand economic spaces” (“economic islands”) – in the differing forms
of Stalinism and European national-socialism since the United Kingdom meeting
of Ottawa in 1932. In this period the “reserve currency” does not have a
clear-cut expression, being dependent on the international political cycle. Which
leads to the second world war.
After that the American economy does not return neither to the pure
liberal pattern of the Roosevelt epoch, nor to the isolationist Keynesian pattern.
The dollar acquires a new quality: it becomes a GEOPOLITICAL unit, a
function of the strategic and ideological potential of the US, of the role of the US
in the world environment.
The world financial system, the function of the dollar as the world
currency reserve are inseparably linked to the concrete geopolitical situation of
the second half of the XX century. If one does not tale into consideration
this geopolitical perspective, only relying on the analysis of purely
economic-financial processes, one cannot understand anything in this field.
4. Trilateralist Model and finance
The Trilateral Commission, founded in 1973, put before itself the task of
reorganising the world economic space into large blocs under Western and US
control. The geopolitical meaning of this project was enforcing the
insulation of the USSR by way of the “anaconda strategy”. To this purpose the world
had to be divided into three geoeconomic zones – the US, Europe, and the
Asia-Pacific region.
The storming economic development required the creation of additional
leading centres, besides the US, and also preparing the legitimisation of new
structures of global direction (excluding the USSR). The three geoeconomic
regions outlined there were not given an equal significance: the American
regional held a privileged position, while the other two remained auxiliary. The
Trilateral initiative came from Rockefeller and George Franklin, then leaders of
the CFR.
There the process of European unification and introduction of European
and Asian-Pacific currencies were for the first time decided.
Auxiliary currencies were called to foster the economic homogenisation of
the corresponding sources, integrating them into economic-financial
paradigms such as to favour in the best way and consolidate the privileged position
of the US, based upon the “inequality of structures”
The euro and the would-be “Asia-Pacific yen” are essentially projects of
the Trilateral Commission. By the way, Chinese perestroika took its start in
the 1980s just from contacts between the Chinese government and the
Trilateral representative George Bertwin, leading the European office.
The dollar – being the world currency reserve, provided with a set of
geopolitical obligations undertaken by the US, and before the US by other powers
– was to be sidelined by the two complementary macro-regional currencies.
The process was not supposed to be rapid – indeed it is still going on.
5. Syncope : the crash of the USSR, the unexpected and extraordinary
challenge of unipolarity
The Trilateral Commission supposed the slow choking of the USSR, with its
gradual absorption within the logic of Atlantism and an easy restructuring
of Soviet Eurasian sectors into the zones of influence of the three
macroeconomic regions.
In this sense the coming euro, the dollar and the hypothetical Asian
currency should serve as instruments to the step-by-step involvement of the USSR
economy into the world system, gradually disconnecting the socialist camp
structures. Also this process was started under direct influence of the
Trilateral and of its gorbachevian representative in Moscow in the mid-1980s.
But at the threshold of the 1990s the unforeseeable happened: instead of
the gradual cycle of convergence and integration of the USSR, the latter
suddenly dissolves and unilaterally starts an active process of self-liquidation.
The rouble was devalued, thus becoming pegged to the dollar with no
delay. The US were directly involved in the post-Soviet financial system.
In parallel to this, the main element of the geopolitical map of the
“cold war” world was aiming at self-liquidation – an element whose presence
itself was, conceptually and structurally, the main corner-stone of the whole
geopolitical construction on which, among other things, the dollar was based.
Being confronted not with the obvious and foreseeable “Soviet enemy”, but
with a “black hole”, unforeseeable, chaotic, irrationally aggressive, not
foreseen in any of their gradual positive economic-financial projects, the US
unexpectedly found themselves in a new situation.
This new geopolitical situation involved the US in a process of
accelerated, extraordinary unipolarity. In the US economy this was accompanied by the
overheating of the hi-tech market, the financial pyramids, the rise of the
purely financial sector at a detriment of the real sector. Also the
military-industrial complex, fundamental for the US economic system, found itself
facing
a new situation, sharply different from the preceding one.
6. The new role of geoeconomic sectors
The unforeseen pace of liquidation and disintegration of the Soviet
(=eurasist) geopolitical pole created a new situation on the world geopolitical
map, correspondingly setting a new challenge to the US financial system. From
now on that system would have to start an accelerated realisation of
unipolarity, i.e. globalisation.
Some of the previously planned stages disappeared. As a consequence, a
new and unexpected situation was rising in line of principle: the dollar was
compelled to become the world reserve currency quickly and without intermediate
stages; the US acquired the unchallenged hegemony at the strategic level;
the demand ripened for a quick restructuring of international institutions –
the United Nations – reflecting the post-Yalta equilibrium; America was
compelled to hasten to make use of the “inequality of structures”.
All this was shown under the direction of the democrats of the Clinton
administration. Fukuyama’s “end of history” had come too soon.
Very relevant economic and logistic problems loomed.
Broadly speaking: the US were not ready to assume here and now the role
of unipolar globalisator. This was expressed
in the understanding of this very fact on part of the Americans (the
victory of Bush jr.);
in the financial pyramids-like crisis of the overheated market, with the
dip of the NASDAQ and Dow Jones indexes;
in the looming catastrophe of the dollar as the world currency reserve;
in the unpreparedness of the basic geopolitical subjects to be involved in
globalisations according to times and modes set by the US.
The absence of the eurasist pole, the turning of Eurasia into a “black
hole” generated geopolitical problems never evaluated in a short-term
perspective.
The presence of a conventional, formal, foreseeable in the medium-term
opposition on the part of Eurasia represented the main element of the American
strategy in the first half of the XX century. Once this element was removed,
the whole construction was being jeopardised.
The absence of a formal and limited threat from the East radically
changed both the geopolitical meaning of the European Union, and the corresponding
role and mission of the euro.
The European Union was developing not in the conditions of confrontation
vis-à-vis the USSR, as it was supposed – and this point had been decisive in
shaping the preservation of American influence in Europe, also in terms of
financial view – but just at the moment of the USSR self-liquidation. It
consequently assumed a completely different function, revealing itself as a
potential geopolitical subject at the planetary level. The introduction of the euro
gets a different meaning. As a principle, it means a challenge to the dollar
as the world reserve currency.
The new entry of Europe on the historical scene is loaded with the most
severe shocks for globalisation in its unipolar form. The variants either of
“regional” or “continental” integration, or of multi-polar globalisation
become necessary; which in both cases goes against that process in which, as
dragged by an avalanche and independently of their willingness, the US are today
involved.
Something similar is true also of the Asia-Pacific region. Here the
Chinese factor has to be added. But the euro and the European Union were already
enough for the unipolar domination of the US to be severely shaken, and
consequently for weakening the dollar and the financial instruments linked to it.
As far as the dollar is linked to world geopolitics, and not only to the
US economy, a change in the balance of power in that sphere automatically
entails a radical change in the function of the dollar. The nature of the dollar
changes, hence its function as the world reserve currency losing its
obviousness.
The US must reassess their role in the world, and correspondingly found
again on the new geopolitical map the function of the world reserve currency –
the dollar. The extreme difficulty of such task is out of question.
The whole US economic system is based on the global reallocation of
labour in the schumpeterian condition of “inequality of structures”.
The transformation of this system entails the most severe consequences.
The same can be said of the “new economy”, with the over-development of
financial and equity sectors. The real paradigmatic actors, which stayed
constantly out of the framework of the “new economy”, but which predetermine the
basic trends of the financial markets (exteriorly represented as independent
from non-market factors, separated from the fundamentals of economics) are
just geopolitics and the univocal US supremacy. The game-like feature of those
trends is the myth for the “stock market proletarians”, simple brokers never
allowed to go beyond the scenes of finance – where there sit not simple
successful speculators, but experts from the CFR, the Bilderberg Club and the
Trilateral, like George Soros. Here the rules of the game are set. The collapse of
equity market or national currencies is not a matter of brilliant operation,
as of plans elaborated and prepared in detail.
7. Trying to rein in globalisation: the conceptual blind alley of George
Bush jr.
The consolidation of the European and Asia-Pacific sectors, the issue of
a strong regional currency linked to not to the global geopolitics, as to
continental or insular geopolitics (from this point of view, it is significant
the new – cautious – reference to keynesism on the part of modern
social-democracies) narrows the scope of the US.
This requirement is – albeit partially – fulfilled by the Bush jr.
administration. Bush jr. means the attempt to rein in globalisation. But this
cannot resolve the problems laying at the roots – American geopolitics is
overheated, the American empire is overstretched.
We stand before a conceptual blind alley: the US cannot give up pursuing
an active unipolar globalisation, but they are not able to do so.
The very same thing is true of the dollar: the US are not able to
preserve the dollar as the world reserve currency, yet they cannot refuse the dollar
this function.
Here is a paradox – the disappearance of the enemy (the USSR) put the winner
in an inconvenient position. A typical pyrrhic victory.
8. The second coming of Eurasia
The original project of the Trilateral Commission was outlined in order
to gradually but inexorably liquidate the USSR (Russia) by means of partition.
On the contrary, the USSR was dissolved not gradually but suddenly, she
became a geopolitical “zero”, and gave impulse – albeit potentially – to the
historical existence of Europe and Asia.
The future fate of Russia-Eurasia will be straightway linked to the fate
of the US, and accordingly to the fate of the dollar.
The collapse of US seigniorage will give Russia an extraordinary chance
of revival.
But this will be accomplished only by means of an adequate geopolitical
strategy towards Europe and Asia.
If Russia will throw its standing strategic potential – including
logistic and nuclear – in support to every alternatives to unipolar globalism,
history has a chance to go on, and the dollar crack will become the crack of the
great geopolitical slavery of mankind under the dollar.
February 2001
Note
Trilateral Commission
The latest stage of the organisation of mondialism secret net was the
creation of the Trilateral Commission, gathering the “cream” of the Council on
Foreign Relations and the Bilderberg Club. It is called Trilateral from the
number of basic participants: the US, Europe, and Japan.
Its centre is located in the US (345 East 46th Street, New York).
Its foundation took place in July 1974. But its decision was approved at
the secret council of November 1972 by the president of Chase Manhattan Bank
David Rockefeller (leader of the Bilderberg Club and promoter of the Council
on Foreign Relations), Max Konigt (vice-president of the ‘Jean Monnet’
Committee for European Integration) and George Franklin, formally head of the CFR.
The first great success of the Trilateral Commission was bringing to the
presidency J.Carter, formerly unknown until the eve of elections. Once
elected president, Carter placed at the highest levels of power members of the
Trilateral Commission: Walter Mondale, Cyrus Vance, Harold Brown, Zbigniew
Brzeszinski, Michael Blumenthal, Richard Cooper, Anthony Solomon, Samuel Huntington
etc. In November 1977 the American magazine Penthouse wrote about it: « It
would not be correct to say that the Trilateral Commission leads the Carter
government. The Trilateral Commission is also the Carter government ».
The meaning of the action of the Trilateral Commission, and of mondialism as
a whole, can be expressed in the words of James Paul Barbourg, pronounced
before the American senate on February 17, 1950: «Whether you want it or not,
we shall have a World Government. The only question is whether this will
happen through consent or violence ».
(L. Okhotin, The Threat of Mondialism, Den’ 1991)
This text, kindly sent us by the Author, will be published on the
forthcoming issue of Elementy (Moscow).
Trans. M. Conserva
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