#87 The Dominant Theme of the 20th and 21st century

There will be now a final series of blogs that will bring Wealth and Power to a conclusion. Readers who have followed the arguments in the blogs since 1945 will have understood some of the keys which connected the pre-1914 world with post-1945.

In some respects, the world had been turned upside for the second time after 1945. The first global upheaval, which I outlined in the blogs, took 400 years. Wealth had been extracted by the colonising European powers, first from the Americas and Africa through stolen gold and enslaved African peoples, and then from Asia, India, and China. Due to the diverse processes of extracting wealth, North America and Western Europe had become wealthier than any part of the world at the time, and probably wealthier than any part of the world in all history.[1]

Simultaneously, in the 18th and 19th centuries, much of the surplus had provided new wealth for reinvestment in what has become known as the industrial revolution. Science and technology - how humans interact with nature – were turned on their heads. During this period profit-making had become the core activity of the political economy, which drove the industrial revolutionising territories.

By any standards of the past, the structure of the world’s wealth had been altered fundamentally. Over these 300 or 400 years, the historical processes had created new struggles and a new intensity of warfare. The new social classes that had arisen out of the new colonised wealth had overthrown the ancient feudal European system of government: first in Britain, next during the Napoleonic Wars, and finally after the 1914-18 conflagration. The old systems of kingship and feudal political control had by 1945 been altered and destroyed across Europe and the rest of the world.

All the ancient empires across the world that had existed in 1789 – the year of the French Revolution - had been destroyed.[2] In Europe and North America, it was taken for granted that capitalism, as a system of running the world economy was the natural order. The drive to make a profit was accepted everywhere without question. Capitalism had become the only game in town. Science and technology were accepted as the internal drivers of the domestic and world economies. Understanding the world without the all-encompassing Gods of the past was almost complete.

The second great global change occurred after 1945 when the political and economic dominance of Western Europe gave way and the USA took control over the rest of the world. The originating Colonial Powers of Spain, Portugal, France, Britain and the Netherlands became smaller players on the world stage, mostly as pawns of the single great power the USA.[3]  The wars between 1914 and 1945 had for a second time turned the world upside down, economically and politically.

Perhaps the first and most dominant change was that the USA has taken control of world power rapidly and this became accepted as 'normal'; the forces that would determine the direction of play after 1945 were still to be devised.

The Ukrainian Example

An anti-terrorist operation in eastern Ukraine. Retrieved from the Ministry of Defence of Ukraine via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.

The present-day Ukrainian example could not be a better example: The struggle to obtain and then hold onto World Power became the dominant theme of every struggle around the world after 1945.  No local struggle however small could be understood after 1945 without an understanding of the dynamics of the global power play.

The struggle first manifested itself in the Cold War, from 1948 to 1989.  The USSR was seen as an enemy of the USA, throughout this period. The USA organised itself to oppose any move of any state to become Socialist. Past blogs have given many examples. By the 1980s, no means was too horrific for the USA (for a time even torture became normal policy). From the USA’s standpoint, every means of statecraft was used to stop socialism in its tracks. No country attempting to create some form of socialism was too small for the attention of the USA.

In 1989, when the USSR first collapsed the US had the option of building up the old USSR as a friendly and wealthy capitalist society or destroying the country once and for all. She chose the latter opportunity.

For a few short years, policymaking was delegated to Jeffrey Sacks and his American team of economists. Price liberalisation was imposed, and the economy was privatised. This so-called ‘shock therapy’ led directly to the destruction of the industrial system, soaring poverty, and national humiliation. The death rate rose rapidly as the rouble lost 80% of its value against the dollar. Interest rates skyrocketed, and even monetary circulation ceased in some areas.

As we saw with Germany in the 1930s, when great nations are humiliated, they react in unpredictable ways. Russia has proven no exception to this rule.

On the surface, the struggle of Ukraine to maintain its independence against the invasion by Russia is what this war is all about. It is a contemporary example of the phenomena we saw in Germany in the 1920 and 30s. At one level, the invasion is what the war is all about.  This is how the Western media, on the whole, portray the war. The pain and suffering of the Ukrainian struggle have been emphasised by the Western media. This is what we see and hear every day on the radio, TV etc. This suffering is real, and we should not lose sight of that. Though, as I’ve encouraged in these blogs, we also need to place events in their historical and political contexts, so that we might understand some of the broader trends going on.

There are though much bigger issues involved. Ever since the Cold war, when the Western powers have attempted to surround the USSR with massive weaponry, the landmass than makes up Russia has been seen as enemy territory. This war is also about Russia’s attempts to resurrect itself as a major power on the world stage.

As this war unfolds, it is also about China and the alliance between the Russians and Chinese. It is becoming clear that the Ukrainian war is simply part of a much wider clash between the great powers of the day. There is on the one hand the USA, whose dominant aim is to overthrow Putin and his government. This is clear from the statements made by the USA leaders. On the other, Russia is reasserting herself on the world stage as a major player, and finally, there is the Russian/China alliance; whose purpose is to defend themselves against US aggression.  These overriding global movements must be understood if the Ukrainian war is to make sense. Then finally there are the Ukrainian people in the middle of the Titians whose struggle is about the future of the whole world.

[1] The process by which wealth was extracted during the colonial era has never to my knowledge been brought together in one place.  It has been my contention that the overriding purpose of the era was the extraction of wealth and exporting it to the home country of the coloniser

[2] Many of the old empires are today long forgotten by all except historians the Ottoman, Austro/Hungarian , the empires in the Americas of the Incas etc, to mention few. The ancient Russian and Chinese Empires were destroyed but reinvented themselves as Communist States.

[3] The way I have portrayed the relations of the old colonial powers is not as they are ordinarily portrayed in the media.  These relations are rarely discussed or analysed publicly, and then mentioned  with without serious discussion.

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