#94 America, China, and the Struggle for Global Hegemony: Can the World Survive?
Throughout this series of blogs, I have told a long story of the world from 1492 to the present day. This final blog will be longer than usual as I now draw together the major themes which have been the backbone of world history and have led us to the world we live in today.
At the start of this blog series, I had two purposes: 1) to illustrate what a strange and historically unique world we have created; unlike anything over the last millennia, and 2) to show continuity, despite all the changes that have occurred. For instance, despite an increasing global population, a literate world, the growth of science and very much more, there have been remarkable continuities over the last two centuries, from the end of the French wars, which concluded in 1815.
Colonisation and the Extraction of Surpluses
To begin with, I systematically went through the colonisation process of the world from 1492 to 1945. As you can see in the blogs on understanding colonialism, this became a global process and lasted 400 years.
By 1492, the world was predominantly rural where most people across the world lived and died in the villages in which they had been born. While students study the history of great civilisations, change was unusual, and these were the exceptions. Many people lived in small groups of tribes and sub-tribes. Some lived in great Empires which only occasionally affected their lives.
Over the next 400 years, until the beginning of the twentieth century, the world we know today began to take shape. The first Europeans began to arrive in the Americas, where they laid waste to all existing societies over 400 years. By the year 1900, very little of the original peoples of the Americas (north or south) was left. The people had been eviscerated, the first real holocaust had been completed, and the indigenous people of the continent had all but disappeared. At first, the lands had their wealth exported back to Europe, mainly in the form of gold. Soon after the invasion, they were settled by Europeans and new societies were created.
The peoples of Western Europe had risen from one world of relative poverty and had learnt how to take the wealth from the Americas and transfer it to their own countries. This was slavery and latterly until 1920, indentureship. A whole set up of banks, shipping companies, and insurance companies had arisen to make these transfers possible.
From the 1750s the European invaders turned their attention to Asia and systematically began the colonisation process anew. At the same time, as they attempted to colonise and extract the wealth of Asia, the colonising countries began the process we now recognise as industrialisation alongside the rapid growth of cities. The surplus resources extracted through colonisation were used to finance the growth of new industries.
Between 1750 and 1900, first, the continent of India and then from the 1840s China and the rest of Asia was colonised by Britain, France, and the Netherlands. In the process of these events, Germany, Japan, and then the USA and Italy joined in the colonising fray from the 1850s to 1945. Over these 150 years of conquests of Asia, the economies were conquered, and surpluses were exported back to the colonising countries. Unlike in the Americas, the peoples of Asia remained in place and other means to extract surpluses were utilised.
Russia had played an important role in the colonisation process. From a small nation-state at the beginning of the period under observation, Russian forces moved South and East. Unlike all other colonisation processes, Russian troops invaded and took control of the territory that was next door. She had no need for a grand navy to colonise territory. Of all the colonisers, Russia simply expanded its territory over 400 years until it controlled land on the borders of China. Unlike France, Britain, and the Netherlands, Russia did not undergo the internal transformations and revolutions resulting from the Reformation. In Russia, the old Feudal system of authority (admittedly with a few reforms) remained in place until the Revolution in 1917.
The last area of the world to be colonised was Mesopotamia and the Islamic belt of people running from the Mediterranean in what is today Libya, Egypt, Syria etc., all the way East to Afghanistan. This great swath of land that had been the primary lands of Islam was only conquered and colonised after the 1914-1918 war. It is useful to remember that these peoples had only 20 years of colonisation before they were superficially able to govern themselves. It was a different world, compared to the Ottoman period. Twenty years to experience Western money, private property, and the world-changing character of Western scientific thought.
It was taken for granted that the extraction of surpluses was the primary goal of all colonising countries from 1492 to 1945. The key foreign policy of all countries able to set themselves to achieve these goals was to colonise and extract value.
The first set of major changes is hardly recognised as such today. These changes are taken for granted today, seen as so commonplace that scholars question me when I argue that the most fundamental changes took place that heralded the world we know today.
European Transformation
None of the above colonisation and wealth extraction would have been possible over such a long period if the Western Europeans had not thoroughly transformed and revolutionised their societies in the process over these 400 years.
At the beginning of 1500, Europe was little different wealth-wise from the rest of the world, and considerably poorer than China and probably India. 400 years later, the world had turned upside down and Western Europeans were the masters of the world.
Simultaneously to the conquest of the world, briefly outlined above, was the revolution that occurred throughout West European. The breakthrough in all these matters occurred because of the Protestant religion throughout the Reformation in Europe. The Reformation occurring first in Europe created the conditions that first revolutionised our world throughout France, Holland, Germany, and Britain.
The relationship between religion, the material world, and the human world have always been one whole. Human beings’ relationship to the earth, to each other, and the wider cosmos has since time immemorial been held together by ideas and beliefs which we now call religion. But religion and life were all one before we disassembled ourselves and brought in science. The disassembling took place over 200 years from the time of Luther and Calvin.
These blogs do not go into detail about the struggles in Western Europe over the true religion. The reformation was already underway in 1492 and continued for 200 years when the Protestant religion had become accepted. During the process, families as well monarchies were torn apart, and it is one reason why Europe was such an aggressive place over that period. The peoples of Europe were at war with themselves within Europe and across the seas as they colonised over this period.
The Material Revolution within Europe: Industrialisation
The first half of my blogs developed the above themes and outlined many of the consequences that followed. Not least of which was the growth of human beings living longer lives, the creation of cities as the new normal, and the manufacture of commodities on a scale previously unknown in global history.
The second set of consequences was war and death by war on a scale previously unimaginable. The nations that had been able to benefit from the largesse of the changes that are generalised as industrialisation, fought each other to a standstill between 1914 and 1945. The very idea of sharing this largesse was in the minds of a minority of peoples.
The winners were the rulers and their acolytes, who were able to envisage wealth on such a scale as had only been enjoyed by monarchs in earlier eras. After 1945, the struggles that had taken place previously within the small group of European Nations were widened out to include the entire world, between two groups of peoples who had different visions on how to share the largesse of the world. The Europeans that had fought each other between 1914 and 1945 suddenly realised that if they cooperated, they could all share the wealth available.
Over these years the volume of wealth increased year on year, as natural science grew and developed. Then around the turn of the 21st century, scientists began to realise that the world was heating up. That the land that we had exploited as a commodity to be bought and sold was reacting. That year on year the ice was melting, the sea was getting warmer, and the seasons were becoming more erratic. Suddenly the whole edifice that had been created over 500 years was possibly about to collapse.
Here I list some changes from industrialisation in no order of importance. I hope it will remind readers just how momentous where these changes were that revolutionised the world.
The printing press: Printing allowed knowledge to be developed year after year and that knowledge to be learnt by everybody. Books and newspapers altered the means to share knowledge democratically.
Private property in land. Nowhere in the world had land been a saleable quantity to be bought and sold. Land use varied across the civilisations of the world, but nowhere was it a commodity. Once land was saleable, there were no boundaries on what else could be bought and sold, including for a long period human beings.
The knowledge of science. Science is at its most basic the understanding of humans’ relationship with themselves and the rest of the world. Religion had been the means to explain why things happened. Science assumes that human beings can explain events in material rather than religious terms. Parallel to science came technology, our ability to alter the world.
By 1945, the world was unrecognisable compared to the centuries that had followed the arrival of Western Europeans in the Americas. Very few people had any idea of the story that had led to the transformation of the world where the land and commodities of the land could be the private property of a tiny number of people. Where wealth was no longer the prerequisite of kings and nobles but was open in principle, if not in fact, for private individuals
The World After 1945
It is as if the world before 1945 never existed. Half of the blogs I have written covered this latter period. My central theme was that, yes, the world did change dramatically after 1945, and at the same time it did not alter that much. My blogs have drawn out these two contrary themes.
Over the earlier 400 years, first Spain and Portugal had attempted to dominate the world. They had failed to make internal changes and their major role in the world severely diminished after the French wars that ended in 1815. Britain, France, and the Dutch had been the major coloniser coming close behind the Spanish and Portuguese. France had also had its colonies destroyed by the French wars but was able to recuperate a new colonial world in the following 100 years. From 1815, Britain dominated the world’s economy for 100 years. By 1900, France had recovered, and Germany was the new player for world power.
The struggle for world power as we know it today had begun in the 19th century. The first titanic conflict was between Britain and Germany with France as a major player and the USA, important but on the sidelines. My blogs illustrate how that struggle continued from 1914 to 1945. By this time all the major European powers who had extended so much wealth on warfare were thoroughly exhausted and bankrupt. The USA came of this struggle as the victor; even though she had lost fewer men by far than any other of the combatants.
The USA was able to take over world power without disturbance from any of the other players.
The USA and the World’s Dominant power
After 1945, the language of empire altered significantly, so much so that it appeared on the surface that a new era had come into play. As well as this language change, the North Americans did not follow the same colonising path. These changes were sufficient to make it appear that a new world was upon us. All the previously colonised nations, except for Palestine, were decolonised and local rulers were expected to rule their peoples. There were real and concrete changes.
It took the new rulers of the old colonised world a while to realise that the extraction of a surplus was still the primary goal of the rulers of the new world. That the idea of ‘independence’ was only partially real. The Americans set about to rule the world. To achieve such goals involved a military that could reach any part of the world quickly. 80 years after the end of these changes, the USA had established 800 military bases across the world. With this, they attempted to destroy any economy that wished to be independent in whatever form that took.
Many of the countries of the old Mesopotamia attempted an independent development path and they were invaded, crushed, and their societies wasted. Today only Iran remains of those countries that attempted some form of independent economy and polity.
The USA used all its resources, intellectually and materially, to maintain its dominant position worldwide. Since the end of the war in 1945, this effort has been never-ending. There is now a wide range of books documenting exactly how this has been achieved. From the start after the 1944 agreements signed at the village of Bretton Woods in the USA, the International Monetary Fund acted as the global financial policeman and the global banker for the countries that needed US dollars to trade. Repayment of debt has always been the priority over the needs of education or health provision. The IMF more than any other tool on the global stage has kept the old colonial countries impoverished and unable to transform themselves.
For some decades, the CIA acted as the American’s secret service and as the armed policemen to overthrow governments that did not adhere to demands required by the USA.
The USA and the World’s Economic Order
Over the 100 years that Britain ruled the world, she maintained economic policies which enriched the rich and left the poor to provide low waged work. The creed that defined this policy was termed ‘free trade’. It meant that capital was free to move across the world; goods were traded without import or export taxation, and people too were able to travel without hindrance. Markets were free to move up and down without hindrance from government. Here was a belief system that left capitalism unrestrained. Both Conservative and Liberal parties followed these maxims.
After 1945, there was an interregnum of 30 years where governments across the world intervened in the marketplace. But after 1971, the USA returned to Britain’s free trade regime but had changed its name. Now it was called neoliberalism. Again, both major USA parties, Democrats and Republicans followed these same market-led practices. While the economies of all parties are infinitely more developed, the ideological underpinnings have remained the same, even if the terms used have changed.
In both the 19th and 20th centuries, the turbulence of the marketplace has continuously threatened the whole system. In both centuries we see the same processes reappearing, as huge monopolistic companies dominate sectors of the economy globally. A tiny minority can gain a vast amount of wealth. A huge underclass of some 20% of the population is uncertain how to house and feed itself. The basic inhumanity of the capitalist system has remained constant to this day.
What is so remarkable is the continuity of the global economic system, even if the terms describing it has altered.
What is clear is that system as organised via American dominance does not work for most of the world’s population. The different economic system pursued in China can be seen to be both effective and efficient for a much larger proportion of the Chinese people. This has led many people to suggest that the future may be Chinese.
The USSR, Russia, and the Cold War.
Russian colonisation remained on the sidelines of history until 1917. The advent of the revolution of that year brought Russia suddenly into the limelight of global history. From 1917 until the collapse of the system in 1991, the USSR was the bugbear of Western capitalism.
I have indicated that Stalin, who led the USSR, was aware that Russia had to suddenly industrialise or be defeated and the revolution destroyed. Britain had taken over 100 years to industrialise, and equally the USA had taken 200 years. The USSR industrialised in a unique short number of years. While Britain and then the USA allied themselves with the USSR during the 1939/45 war, this was an alliance of convenience. Immediately after Germany had been defeated, the USA with Britain started to find ways to defeat USSR.
From 1945 until 1991 the USA’s dominant foreign policy was to defeat the USSR. When that did occur, the economists of the USA moved in to dictate a new Russian policy. Ten years followed as the people of the were impoverished and the value of the economy shrunk by 45%. When Vladimir Putin moved to take over a much-reduced Russia, the country again became the enemy of all the Western nations. The present-day war in Ukraine needs to be understood within this history and frame.
China: The New Threat to USA’s Global Hegemony
China is the new threat to the USA’s world hegemony. If the US economists had had the foresight to learn Mandarin, they might not have made the mistakes they have done in assessing Chinese success.
Unlike the earlier contenders for world power, like Germany in the 19th century and the USSR in the 20th, China has a long history of statecraft to call upon where she had been the dominant power and had to organise state-to-state relations. And to help China navigate her relations with the rest of the world, she has an ideological frame through Marxism and Confucianism. Two ideologies, when taken together, provide her with the ability to be flexible in the manner she runs her global relationships.
So far at any rate this has provided the Chinese with the ability to read the broad themes of change and to adapt her economy, her international politics, and her internal social developments. Neither Britain nor the USA has had to defeat an adversary so well attuned to economic developments and political change. Until now, American scholars and policymakers have continuously underestimated Chinese policy.[i]
During the period from Mao’s revolution in 1969, until his death, no one in the USA saw China as a potential threat to their global dominance. Similarly, they did not expect that China’s double-digit growth would have legs. Then the broad line of opinion was that China would follow the US example and develop a system of political democracy. Eventually, at around the turn of the 20th century, the Americans realised that China would soon overtake them in terms of world growth and was in fact a threat to their world dominance and especially to the US dollar system of global trade.[ii]
For the last 20 years, the Americans have realised that China represented a threat to their own system of world dominion. This realisation was brought home to the Americans when Russia entered into a close relationship with China. The Americans were reminded of Halford John Mackinder, a British geographer who published his heartland theory, The Geographical Pivot of History in 1904. He argued that whoever controlled the ‘heartland’ controlled the world. In Mackinder’s view, an alliance of Russia and China represented the heartland.
The USA has spent their entire existence since becoming a nation-state on the Eastern seaboard in the 1750s by defeating its enemies by military force. For her first 150 years, the invading colonists fought and eventually defeated the entire population of indigenous people. Some 50 to 100 million people were killed. After defeating their internal enemies, they began to colonize. They were also forced into the two world wars between 1914 and 1945. Thereafter, the US military has been hard at work across the world. Since 1945, there has hardly been a year when the USA military was not at war somewhere in the world. The US seems to know nothing else but physical force.
The present Ukrainian war should be understood in light of the American struggle to maintain global hegemonic power.[iii] There is a long history of geopolitical strategies written by senior members of the dominant imperial powers from Halford Mackinder (1904) onwards. At the present moment possibly Henry Kissinger, Paul Wolfowitz, and Brzezinski are the leading strategists. Their thinking provides the basic architecture of current policies. Brzezinski makes clear why Ukraine was so important for Russia and why the USA wishes to not just defeat Russia but to permanently weaken her for the foreseeable future. Ukrainians are the latest unfortunate peoples to be in the middle. Likewise, the rise of China should be understood in a similar geostrategic light, as a dire threat to the American global primacy and that any means to counter this threat are possible.
[i] These two paragraphs on Chinese flexibility on the world stage come from my reading of Chinese scholars. Articles translated from Mandarin printed in Monthly Review Press Journal illustrate the huge changes China undertook when the USSR fell. Chinese scholars, time and again, watch what happens in the West and react to reassess her own needs.
[ii] Civilisation studies, as a grand history reaching back millennia, began in the 19th century and have continued into our own era. Authors include:
Arnold Toynbee’s A Study of History in 12 volumes focuses on the rise and fall of civilizations;
Carroll Quigley’s Tragedy and Hope A History in our Time, a mere 650,000 words.
More recently:
Samuel Huntingdon, A Clash of Civilisations: And The Remaking Of World Order, Simon & Schuster UK; Reissue edition (5 Jun. 2002).
Sir Halford John Mackinder, a British geographer who published his heartland theory, The Geographical Pivot of History in 1904. Mackinder argued that the center of the world concerned the heartland which he crudely defined as central Europe and Asia. More importantly, he argued that whoever controlled the heartland controlled the world. Perhaps even more importantly, the British elite who ran foreign policy believed Mackinder’s theory to be true and accurate. From the time of publication in 1904, the British believed that a Russian-German alliance would be the heartland of the world.
[iii] The best outline of USA Geostrategy in the 21st century can be found in Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives, Basic Books, 1997
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The peoples of Western Europe had risen from one world of relative poverty and had learnt how to take the wealth from the Americas and transfer it to their own countries. This was slavery and latterly until 1920, indentureship. A whole set up of banks, shipping companies, and insurance companies had arisen to make these transfers possible. From the 1750s the European invaders turned their attention to Asia and systematically began the colonisation process anew. At the same time, as they attempted to colonise and extract the wealth of Asia, the colonising countries began the process we now recognise as industrialisation alongside the rapid growth of cities. The surplus resources extracted through colonisation were used to finance the growth of new industries.