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Globalisation is leading to permanent war. Here’s what we should do instead [1]
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Date: 2023-01
‘Seinfeld’ is back on Netflix, but those truly seeking to recapture the spirit of the 1990s should seek out ‘The Lexus and the Olive Tree’, the 1999 book by Thomas Friedman, one of the era’s superstar intellectuals. In a burst of liberal triumphalism, Friedman posited “the Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention”. His observation was that “no two countries that both have McDonald’s have fought a war against each other since each got its McDonald’s”.
According to Friedman’s theory, once a state was rich enough to host a McDonald’s supply chain, it became a “McDonald’s country”. And “people in McDonald’s countries didn't like to fight wars any more” – they preferred their consumer comforts.
Events of the 2020s make that seem laughable. In a new book, political scientist Mark Galeotti argues that the contemporary world is instead characterised by “the weaponisation of everything”. Subsea internet cables are protected from sabotage by underwater drones. Giant countries restrict package holidays to make tiny islands bend to their diplomatic will. Governments cut deals with heroin traffickers to circumvent blockades, while intelligence agencies set up dating websites to lure terrorists in search of a spouse.
What makes Galeotti’s argument stand out, particularly amid claims from some analysts that we are entering a period of ‘deglobalisation’, is its acknowledgement that there is no turning back from an interconnected world. Instead, the deepening of each connection increases the possibilities for weaponisation.
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It is the vast expansion of global financial flows since the 1970s that has made financial sanctions such a potent weapon in the arsenal of the US, just as it is the rise in global migration in the 21st century that allows Turkey to use refugees as a bargaining chip against the EU. The huge increase in international law since World War Two permits ‘lawfare’, as tribunals become battlegrounds for territorial jockeying in the South China Sea.
Galeotti’s account is best seen as part of recent attempts to theorise what Mary Kaldor, professor of global governance at the London School of Economics, termed the “new wars’: “permanent low-level conflict, often unnoticed, undeclared and unending”, as Galeotti puts it. But while the new wars thesis neatly captures the gradual extinguishment of traditional notions of ‘peace’, it is premature in declaring the end of traditional notions of war.
This blindspot derives from over-reading the shift in warfare; Galeotti interprets the new wars as the result of a decline in inter-state conflict generally, but he is really describing the decline in direct military conflict between the so-called great powers, which is underpinned more than anything by the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Ukraine joins Georgia, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan and numerous others in the list of non-nuclear powers that have faced ‘traditional’ forms of military intervention this century.
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[1] Url:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/russia-ukraine-china-globalisation-war-peace-trade-conflict-solution-thomas-friedman-mark-galeotti-mcdonalds/
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