The CCPA Monitor February 1999
THE NEW DEADLY FACE OF WAR IS ECONOMIC GLOBALIZATION
By Dr. Ursula Franklin
Back in 1989, it looked as if our concerns for peace were coming to
some resolution. It looked as if there might be peace because the end
of the Cold War appeared to be in sight, and that meant the quest for
peace was going to be, if not completely successful, at least
substantially advanced.
Unfortunately, the sphere of our reality has changed very drastically
since 1989, mostly for the worse. Those of us who had hoped that,
with the end of the Cold War, money that used to be spent on the arms
race would become available for human needs were deeply disappointed.
We expected there would be more money for teaching and research, for
addressing environmental deterioration, for building institutions for
peace and international cooperation.
But the end of the Cold War did not re-channel resources into peace,
the environment, or unmet human needs. Instead of the promised "peace
dividend," we got a displacement of war rather than an abolition of
war.
The displacement of war occurred essentially at two levels. On the
first level, war as the old shooting reality remained painfully
present, in Bosnia, in Cheechnya, in Rawanda, in Kosovo, and many
other places around the world. At the second level, war was displaced
into the economic sphere, where it takes the form of a struggle for
global commercial conquest.
Economic competition and conflict have taken on the very
characteristics of active, slaughtering warfare--from propaganda and
scapegoating to the loss of lives, displacement of populations, and
the destruction of the environment.
Instead of a peace dividend, we see in our own country, Canada,
cutbacks and layoffs. We see neglect and degradation of scholarship,
of the civil environment and of nature. The so-called jobs crisis,
the automation of work and human tasks, is on the most profound level
a war against people. The new policies of globalization and trade
agreements are part and parcel of the type of threat system that the
peace movement has tried to fight and expose at least for the past
four decades. War has been transposed into another key.
How come? What happened? Surely, with the end of the Cold War, the
justification and the stated reason for an arms race ended (remember,
there was an "evil empire," justifying everything from Star Wars to
stealth bombers).
Why did the major world powers not convert to peace? Why did the
cooperative and constructive developments we had hoped for not come
about? In order to come to grips with these questions, it is
necessary to give some special attention to the recent manifestation
of modern technologies.
Citizen advocacy has often involved discussions of technology,
critiques of the way things were done--as well as what was being
done. Technological changes have frequently brought groups within
society face to face with the need to influence decision-making and
regulations in areas that suddenly affected everyone's lives--be it
the testing of nuclear weapons, the pollution of air and water, or
the depiction of violence on television. The subjects and thrust of
citizen interventions can be a sensitive barometer indicating
incipient changes in social and political relationships.
What, then, should be the themes of citizen interventions as we near
the millenium, particularly those involving the work for peace? I am
convinced that it is necessary to re-focus citizens' perspectives and
priorities, as well as to scrutinize the role technology played in
the transition from the Cold War world to the present post-Cold War
realities.
In my Massey Lectures, I said that there are two distinct tasks for
any state that wishes to use military production as an infrastructure
for the advancement of technology and employment: 1) the state must
assure the flow of money to the military-industrial complex, and 2)
the state has to assure at the same time the ongoing presence of an
Enemy who can justify massive outlays of public funds for research,
development, and procurement of instruments and infrastructure of
"defence."
The designated Enemy must warrant the development of the most
advanced technological devices. The Enemy must be cunning,
threatening, and just barely beatable by novel, truly ingenious and
heroic technologies.
The social and political needs for an Enemy are so deeply entrenched
that such Enemies would have had to appear relatively speedily after
the end of the Cold War, so that the existing technological power
structure could be maintained.
The Enemy does not necessarily have to be the government or the
citizens of a foreign state. There is a lot of scope, as well as
historical precedence, for pursuing the Enemy within. And,
unfortunately, it was this turning inward of the war machine that
happened when the "evil empire" collapsed. The West's technological
infrastructures were not dismantled, but continued to be used. Their
new use, I suggest, is now called globalization, or global
competition.
In other words, the technological tools of control and conquest are
now serving their old functions in a new key, thus creating a new
form of war. The new battlefields are "the markets," though not
pleasant markets like the St. Lawrence Market in Montreal or the
Byward Market in Ottawa, where real people sell and buy, chat, and
get to know one another.
The new markets are the stock and currency markets, the faceless
markets of electronic transmissions. The responses of these markets
have become significant indicators of the supposed well-being of
people and nations. How the stock and money markets react to
elections and referenda appears to be much more meaningful to
governments than the so-called will of the people.
It is, of course, not new that wars are being fought for access to
resources, for the enhancement of trade and commerce. What is new, in
terms of the transmutation of war itself, is that the battlefields
are no longer territorial. There is no physical ground involved that
may be "ours" or "theirs."
What the technologies of 40 years of war-making have achieved is to
make territory immaterial, just as intercontinental ballistic
missiles have made national boundaries immaterial and neutrality
irrelevant. The full arsenal of the publicly-financed technologies of
war, from operations research to computer systems, from satellites to
space communications and integrated networks, have become the
instruments of a new war for global commercial power.
But who and where, you may ask, is the Enemy?
In the war of global competition, the Enemy is people: all the people
who look at community, at work, at nature, and at other human beings
as sources of meaning and interaction--not as commodities.
Whatever cannot be bought or sold, whatever cannot be expressed in
terms of money and gain/loss transactions stands in the way of "the
market." It is Enemy territory, and as such must be occupied,
transformed and conquered. Work will be dome by machines or devices,
not by people. People--the Enemy--will be laid off, put aside like
dirty dishes, sent away somewhere else--the economic version of
ethnic cleansing.
We who inhabit Enemy territory occupy the home of the common good, of
art, of friendship and scholarship, of whatever is held in common and
cannot be cut up into parcels of private property. This realm and
those who live in and care for it are the targets in this new war. We
have been designated by the global economic warriors as their Enemy.
Wherever human beings see themselves neither as buyers nor sellers,
neither as customers nor clients, but feel that their vitality and
their sustenance comes out of a collectivity of interests, a
community of shared experiuences and values--their lives will be
under attack.
The attack is not always clear and overt. It can be subtle or
neighbourly. Yet, for the peace movement, this new face of war must
become as unacceptable as the old face of war.
When we began the work for peace as the Voice of Women, we tried to
speak to women around the world about the future of their children.
We must now speak about the new war in the same manner. We must ask
one another: what about the common good, the care of the environment?
What kind of work will there be for our children? What is happening
to the human community? In what way can we make cause with other
ordinary people of this world in a concerted resistance against this
new war?
You may ask how we can re-focus the new approach to peace, when so
many of the old problems are still so much with us. There are still
nuclear weapons and their testing, still land mines, still arms sales
and weapons development.
The new developments, however, are so deeply embedded in the old,
both technologically and politically, that both can and should be
addressed together. We need to analyze as clearly as possible the
market ideology of war, identify its destructiveness as well as its
immorality, and protest its practice by our country and with our
money.
Surely, the commandment "thou shalt not kill" does not apply only to
those who use guns or bombs. Peace is a most pressing issue to engage
all of us who--in Camus's words--wish to be neither victim nor
executioner.
(Dr. Ursula Franklin, C.C., FRSC, is Professor Emeritus and a
Senior Fellow at Massey College, University of Toronto. This article
was adapted from the 1995 Lois and John Dove Memorial Lecture.
The full text was published earlier in Peace magazine.)
**************************************************************
David Spratt
Telephone 613-9482-5436 / fax 613-9482 4268
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