Back to The Making of an Atlantic Ruling Class home
Epilogue
From Trilateralism to Unilateralism
The
eclipse of industrial capital in the profit-distribution process from 1966 to
1968 marked the beginning of the end of the era of corporate liberalism and
Atlantic integration. Unlike previous, conjunctural changes in the balance of
economic power, the 1970s rise in the share of bank and oil capital, together
with concomitant improvements in rentier incomes, spurred the formation of a new
class bloc outside the hitherto prevailing corporate-liberal area of compromise
and outside the traditional regional centres of mass production industry. The
domestic movement from the Northeast to the Sunbelt, as well as the
international shift from densely integrated production to sub-contracting
directed from the London-based Euro-currency and capital market, tendentially
undermined the hegemony of corporate liberalism and fostered the forces of the New
Right instead. 1
The reaction of the ruling classes in the
main North Atlantic states to the crisis developing in the American economy, and
passed on to the rest of the world by the Nixon policy and the oil crisis, at
first consisted of a dramatic turn towards imperialist unity. In the context of
runaway internationalization and the rise of money-capital a pervasive
liberalism for a time sought to restore the precondition of a concerted reaction
to the challenges facing the capitalist system. Capitalist unity was also
spurred by the synchronization of the crisis across all the OECD economies at
once. 'On the basis of the data on 1930-32, one would expect that a major shock
to the system would find economies reacting almost in unison', Rosecrance and
his associates write in this connection. In 1973-74, 'this is precisely what
happens'. 2
At the political level, the turn towards
renewed cohesion was reflected in the quick succession of changes
of command between February and August 1974: Harold Wilson
replaced Edward Heath; Giscard succeeded Pompidou; Helmut Schmidt
replaced Brandt; and Gerald Ford was installed as Nixon's successor as part of a
deal to avoid the latter's impeachment. In
mid-December, Presidents Ford and Giscard met on the island of
Martinique and reached agreement on a common stand against the threat to their
energy supply, an issue on which Pompidou had refused to budge before. Thus the
way was cleared for a conference of the American, German, French, British,
Italian and Japanese leaders in November 1975 in Rambouillet near Paris.
The apparent return of the Western European
states to the Atlantic fold, however, did not obliterate the fundamental trend
towards unilateralism and rivalry. Real, as opposed to merely rhetorical, unity
was far off, especially as long as the Republican administration in Washington
remained committed to a defensive, heavy-handed reaction against nationalism and
socialism. Kissinger's bellicose threats in the Middle East and his incautious
support for the Greek colonels in their conflict with Turkey over Cyprus,
followed by his encouragement to South Africa's intervention against the MPLA in
Angola in 1975, further undermined Atlantic unity. Meanwhile, weak links in the
imperialist chain were breaking. In Portugal,
an eleventh-hour coordination, with the Socialist International bolstering the
domestic position of Mario Soares and us planes flying in conservative
Portuguese settlers from the liberated colonies, was necessary to prevent the
Portuguese Revolution from consolidating itself.
The European bourgeoisie's greater tolerance
toward social reform in the Third World was motivated both by the rise of
Eurocommunism and by their greater dependence on imported raw materials. In
Italy, Aldo Moro was the main proponent of a strategy of domestic
rapprochement with Eurocommunism, linked to a foreign policy friendly to
moderate Third World nationalism. His objections to Italian subordination to the
Kissinger line were brought out by the Socialist state secretary, Bensi, who
argued the need for direct agreements with the oil-producing nations during a
visit to the United States by President Leone.3 This strategy was particularly
appealing also to the French state sector and to German capital, which had
failed to penetrate the international cartel of raw material multinationals,
almost exclusively Anglo-American, and now could hope to capitalize on the trend
towards state ownership of raw material resources in the Third World. 4
The Trilateral Commission, established in
1972-73, attempted to strike a realistic balance between American interests and
European (and Japanese) aspirations in this respect, and to
insert them into a common framework of imperialist cooperation. In the Ford
Administration, several leading Trilateralists tried to tilt foreign policy back
towards ultra-imperialism, but the presence of Kissinger blocked any dramatic
turn. Jimmy Carter, 'one of those Southern governors' recommended by Averell
Harriman as an ideal Democratic presidential candidate, and a member of the
Trilateral Commission himself, narrowly defeated Ford in the election of
November 1976. With a cabinet loaded with Trilateralists and a programme
apparently well-designed to rehabilitate the social imperialist consensus at
home and unity of purpose abroad American capitalism once again seemed capable
of recapturing the historic initiative from socialism.
Projecting the United States as the bastion
of 'human rights’(which became the new ideological motif of the Carter
administration)
required, however, that the ruling class purge itself of some those
publicly associated with the crimes of the recent past. In Europe, meanwhile,
the 'Trilateral' fraction wanted to free themselves from the compromised
Atlantic cold warriors now that a conciliatory line seemed to be prevailing on
the Left, constituting a challenge that would have to be met in the Centre. In
the United States the Senate hearings on ITT's involvement in Nixon's anti-trust
policy and the overthrow of Allende in Chile served a comparable purpose, as did
several measures upgrading Congressional prerogatives at the expense of
Presidential discretion. But when, after the Watergate scandal and Nixon's
removal from the scene, the Senate Subcommittee on
Multinational Corporations started hearings on Lockheed's
bribery of leading European and Japanese statesmen, the purge spread overseas,
offering an opportunity to crucify the comprador liberals who had functioned as
an appendix to the Nixon-Kissinger policy.
In West Germany, the Grand Coalition already
had disposed of the old American hands of Marshall Plan vintage, but Italian
compliance with Kissinger's concept of American world responsibilities was still
obtained from a culpable president (Leone), who had accepted Lockheed bribes
under the cover name' Antelope Cobbler’. In 1977, two former defence
ministers, Gui and Tanassi, were indicted by the Italian parliament as a result
of the Lockheed expose. In the Netherlands, Prince Bernhard, the chairman of the
Bilderberg Conferences, was stripped of his military and commercial functions. 5
The new American offensive, emphatically
requested by Chancellor Schmidt, was built on peaceful confrontation with
socialism and compromise within capitalism. Interacting with the thrust of the
international restructuration of capital, the Carter offensive aimed at
constructing ultra-imperialist consensus along the North-South axis. This view
came close to the ideas propounded principally from Europe (although echoed by
McNamara at the World Bank) on a New International Economic Order, which aimed
at continuing detente with the socialist states and an accommodating approach to
Third World nationalism. In the Carter Administration, these positions found
their best representation in the attitudes of Secretary of State Vance,
strategic arms negotiator Warnke, and UN ambassador Andrew Young.
Shared responsibility for expansion into the
Third World clashed with the reality of competition, however. It also floundered
in the face of different estimates of the danger of the Soviet presence in the,
countries recently liberated from the imperialist system. Soviet military power,
inflated in response to the American arms build-up and aggressiveness in the
preceding era, gradually became the central issue around which imperialist unity
converged, contradicting the initial position of the administration and its
supporters abroad. At the same time a policy of aggressive response to any
challenge to the imperialist system, whether in the Middle East or in Central
America, conformed much more easily with the aggressive self- confidence of the
classes associated with the movement away from the New Deal order. When in
1978-79 the brief recovery of American industrial profits gave way to an
across-the-board improvement of the profit share of the financial sector,
rentiers, small capital, and notably the oil companies, (which climbed from
$13.8 billion in 1978 to $28 billion in 1980, while the aggregate profit figure
for the us economy fell); the mounting tide of the revolt of the Right, ranging
from brushfire tax revolts to the formation of the Committee on the Present
Danger favouring military confrontation with the Soviet Union, increasingly
isolated the conciliatory elements in the Carter administration.
Thus half-way through the Carter presidency,
the attempt to obtain a viable format of inter-imperialist relations around the
strategy of coopting and challenging the threats of peripheral nationalism and
social revolution was abandoned. In economic policy, the replacement of the
industrialist Miller at the head of the FED by the orthodox banker, Paul Volcker,
who came from the Chase Manhattan bank and had served in the Nixon
administration, marked the end of the policy of expansion; in foreign affairs, Brzezinski's knack
for military solutions prevailed over Vance’s moderation
and ultimately led to the resignation of the Secretary of State.
Unable to accommodate both peripheral challenges and the aspirations of the
allies in that area at the same time, American policy shifted its focus from the
revolt of the Third World to the confrontation with the Soviet Union. Soviet
support for the anti-imperialist liberation struggles and revolutions in
Southern Africa and Ethiopia, and its 1978 invasion of Afghanistan to protect
client modernizers from the Muslim tribal forces, allowed the aggressive element
in the Atlantic bourgeoisie to focus attention on the East-West military
relationship, which proved a much more viable format for imperialist unity.
In 1979, Atlantic military unity was once
more confirmed when Carter, Giscard, Schmidt, and Callaghan (Labour's
Atlanticist Foreign Secretary who had replaced Wilson as Prime Minister in
1976), summiting on the island of Guadeloupe, decided to go ahead with the
installation of new American strategic nuclear missile in several Western
European NATO states. Callaghan was able to attach a proposal to simultaneously
start negotiations on the nuclear weapons balance with the Soviet Union in order
to convince the public of NATO's good intentions, but the single olive branch
did not take away widespread concern over the possible consequences of
introduction of 572 new nuclear missiles.
As
a result of its waverings over Iran and Nicaragua, as well as its deflationary
economics, the Carter administration was swept away in 1980 by the Reagan
landslide. Meanwhile, a vote of censure had brought down the Callaghan
government already in 1979, and Schmidt and Giscard, too, before long were
removed from the scene. Bowing to the military and monetary exigencies of the
Reagan administration's hard-line unilateralism, their successors have shown
themselves incapable of formulating a new comprehensive concept of control
adequate to the realities of the post-Atlantic world economy while preserving a
minimal degree of imperialist unity. As the passive revolution of Atlantic
Fordism draws to a close, and the phantom of nuclear annihilation hovers over
the Northern Hemisphere, the urgency of restoring global: imperialist unity can
only increase.