The Lost Massey Lectures (37 page)

Collective action under the leadership of the superior power, the United States, has been the Western option, but it has, until recently, taken the form of alliances and treaty organizations in which all partners are heard and presumably their views taken into account. The motivating principle behind the degree of centralization accepted at Williamsburg seems to be a conscious longing within the American leadership for the same terrifying accumulation of powers and degree of cohesion and political conformity in the West that is the Soviet reality. One has to ask if it is necessary to convert an organized system of alliances into a cabinet of satellites and so degrade the very system of Western traditions of pluralism and liberty that we proclaim, in order to achieve the alleged advantages of the efficiency and discipline that we impute to the members of the Warsaw Pact.

Centralization of power and authority that begins with the military and economic sectors leads inevitably to pressures for the integration of all decision making and a degree of commitment and obedience to the bloc's objectives that leave only marginal
room for the national purposes. Such a commitment can hardly be expected of democratic nations possessing a long history of freedom to set their own goals and to choose the instruments of policy necessary to their achievement.

To create a Western bloc involves the location of the foundations of military and economic power in a single authority, the most powerful member being the United States. The foundations are the centralization of all decision making; the unification of the total resource base of the member nations; the control and allocation of all resources, human and material, to achieve maximum output; forced resolution of conflicts between the bloc's objectives and national goals; and finally the subordination of the interests of consumers and the standard of living generally to the goals of increased productive power and military security. Efforts to regiment the Western world in this fashion would require, if not the terrorization practised in the East, enormous economic pressure and the terrifying threat to abandon the recalcitrant to the nuclear nightmare.

Before we proceed further in the substitution of the present system of international relations, the pluralism of the Western alliances, for the tightly knit bloc control that typifies the Soviet monolith, we should examine very carefully the pressures that are being exerted. One virtue of the present international system is that, while the United States is clearly the leader of the West, it has to take account of and bring into consensus or compromise the views of its partners. The creation of an American-Japanese-European superbloc under American hegemony allows no such flexibility or dialogue. We become more and more the satellites, forced to subordinate national priorities for the interests of the bloc system.

If we go this route, we have to ask ourselves how different would the two systems of political control over the lives and times
of our citizens then be. The major difference would appear to be the greater diffusion of property and private power in the West, but how quickly could that be eroded in the new system of centralized decision making?

Given a superbloc in the West, the two political systems would have much more in common than is supposed. Each could annihilate the other with its nuclear power. Each would emphasize the growth of industrial and productive power as a priority. Each would subordinate the interests of the consumer to military and economic growth objectives. As the people of the Soviet bloc are powerless before the bureaucratic authority, so too would the people of the West lose power to our corporate and public monuments of stone. The difference would be one of degree.

The argument for military globalism is that only then would the West have the cohesion, discipline, and the nuclear inventory and configuration that could effectively oppose the Russian menace. Experts, however, such as Admiral Robert Falls of Canada, Rear Admiral LaRocque of the United States, and field Marshal Lord Carver of the United Kingdom, tell us that we have more than enough nuclear weaponry already in position to inflict untold casualties and destruction on the Soviet Union. Since the enemy can do the same to us, both sides are in the same position—no possible victory, only complete and utter defeat.

It is a good thing to know that the Western alliance has more than enough nuclear missiles; the bad thing is that we keep on building more; the worst thing of all is not to know why—why more production, why more deployment, why a superbloc of the West. If we are not satisfied with the power to annihilate, what will we be satisfied with?

NATO
officials have themselves maintained that the 1979 decision to station intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe was psychological and political rather than military. The
NATO
generals, in their venture into psychology, argue that the highly visible death-dealing Cruise and Pershing II missiles deployed on European soil will comfort the populations of Europe. It is at least arguable that fear, despair, and hysteria at the sight of some 572 of these monsters of destruction may be the paramount response, with Europe facing a hot and riotous period as installations go forward.

NATO
and the Warsaw Pact are the instruments of their respective masters. They are neither political nor executive in respect of their powers. Both
NATO
and the Warsaw Pact are genuine deterrents against perceived threats. We have here the classic instance of two bureaucracies leaning upon each other for nourishment. As each screams its defiance, they guarantee the continuity and growth of the functions and purposes of the other. Russia uses the belligerence of
NATO
to maintain its grip over its Eastern satellites, while the Warsaw Pact serves as the rationale for stripping the industrial nations of the West of sovereignty in their military and economic policies and creating the United States supranational bloc.

The summit conference is now an established coming together with the purpose of stopping the Russian threat. With this objective there can be no dispute. In a nuclear era, we can hardly find security on a nation-by-nation defence. The meaning of Williamsburg, however, is that we intend to create the identical military and economic monolith in the West that exists in the East. Thus there will be two, and two only, supranational powers facing each other, each power believing that the other is all black while absolute right and justice remains with it alone. Williamsburg brings not a movement toward the foundation of a true international order but the absolute polarization of two political crusades treading a head-on collision course.

Williamsburg has brought us back to the bipolar world of the
1950s and John Foster Dulles, with Moscow speaking for the East and Washington speaking for the Canadians, Europeans, and Japanese. In the fluid, unpredictable, nuclear atmosphere of violence, the polarization can only deepen the tensions and expand the areas of conflict, making reassessment and negotiation all the more difficult since neither side will want to risk the possible humiliation of retreat and loss of face.

Williamsburg reaffirmed the deployment of the intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe; it announced the creation of a Japanese-American-European superbloc. We already live in a world that faces annihilation in the event of a nuclear war. Our future will be, as Jonathan Schell describes, “the republic of insects and grass.” The superbloc set forth at Williamsburg adds little if anything to the military unification that already exists at
NATO
. It makes little sense to add to the arms or improve the system when you have already passed well beyond the point of mutual annihilation. If more arms are redundant, more food, water, education, health, and housing for the underprivileged of this world are not. Reducing the production of arms by two weeks would enable us to double our spending on these vital elements in the world's standard of living.

Despite all the headlines, all the editorials, all the meet-the-press and week-in-review commentaries, there is no evidence that the danger of nuclear war is growing. There can be no winners in a nuclear holocaust. There is something fundamentally irrational in the confrontation of two powers that keep their citizens in anxious suspense even though each has brought the other to a standstill. When victory is not possible, when further action means utter defeat, it is time to accept the deadlock, relieve the tensions, and create the environment that will enable all peoples to pursue the ways and means to creative living.

An American-Japanese-European economic bloc to support the
military stance makes good sense from the American point of view, if it can be obtained under the terms outlined in the Williamsburg agreement, which in effect defined the basic economic unit as the Western world. Given the total commitment of the United States to guaranteeing the security of the industrial West, including Japan, the fusion of economic policies as they converge with American objectives follows as the necessary condition.

Thus President Reagan outlined the agreement as “policy actions leading to convergence of economic conditions in the medium term.” Essential to the agreement is the understanding that East-West economic relations should hinge upon and be compatible with the security interests of the West. This restores the United States to the unquestioned political, economic, and military dominance that it enjoyed in the two decades prior to its involvement in Vietnam.

That the United States should be the heartland, the core, of Western values and principles is not in dispute. That it should exercise leadership, persuasion, and direction by example is again not the issue. That the United States should be in a position to impose and to dictate policies and priorities for the other nations of the West would be the end of the politics and pluralism of the Western world. It is this that is unacceptable.

Williamsburg not only defined the industrial West as a global community, it outlined some of the terms of global governance. The leaders agreed to maintain appropriate interest rates and to avoid the inflationary growth of monetary aggregates. They further agreed to reduce their budget deficits by exercising stringent control over government expenditures—at least in the areas of housing, education, health and welfare, and social security, but presumably not in the area of military and defence expenditures, where all members are expected to increase their shares of spending. Equally fundamental is the agreement to work for stabilized
exchange markets and, by restricting the use of exchange-rate policy to solve critical national problems, so to strip away the flexibility open to sovereign and autonomous nations and their elected leaders. In other words, the needs of the bloc take precedence over the particular priorities of the member nations.

The problem with extending the concept of interdependence from the military to the economic sector is that we are dealing with the creation of a bloc composed of nations which are now sovereign, which vary in resource wealth, size of markets, needs for capital, and are unequal in productivity and overhead costs. The policies of convergence leave no room to manoeuvre for the solution to these imbalances and the problems that they bring.

The heightened anxiety caused by the increasing polarizations of the two superpowers prevents people from arguing the unsupported and unproven claims that economic interdependence will yield a greater output and that maintaining the benefits of their greater efficiency is vital to Western survival. The blunt facts are that economic interdependence demands the integration of national economies and, therefore, the denial of freedom to an elected government to address a nation's problems and priorities.

A nation will then be defined quite simply as an area, the part of a greater entity, an area where resources are plentiful or an area where labour is cheap or an area where capital is plentiful. In the relevant market of the West, some regions will specialize in steel production, others in chemicals, pulp and paper, cars, agricultural products, etc. Engineers, using technical principles of location theory, will put populations, money, and land in their computers and position the producing facility accordingly. Unstated is the basic assumption that, to make economic interdependence work, there must be a perfect mobility of labour—that is, people must be willing to follow capital, the more perfectly mobile factor, as it moves across nations and continents. Equally
unstated and undebated is the pretence that immigration laws and other restrictions do not exist.

The free movement of goods, services, capital, and persons across borders—“what an arrogant and pretentious statement.” And what a peculiar definition of freedom when the price of a job requires workers to leave home, heritage, culture, tradition, language, and the community of friends and family.

Globalism is defined in economic terms as the optimal allocation (use) of men and women, resources and capital, across the broad spectrum of the bloc. Globalism, therefore, is specialization—but specialization means an ever-growing dependency. Nations become famous for making the wings of a plane but not the fuselage, for mining the ore but not milling it, for cutting down the trees but importing the furniture. Gone is the balanced growth that would enable a state to offer the wide range of career opportunities to a youth educated at great expense.

The specialization process imposes a planned dependency on a nation. Specialization makes interdependence necessary after it has first made the nation vulnerable by creating an unbalanced economy at home. Specialization in resource exploitation makes the nation subject to the terms and conditions imposed by the industrial powers for its manufacturing needs. The converse is also true.

Consider the logic of international economic interdependence, that is, the deployment of the resources of the globe according to a single most efficient scheduling, an abstract idea at best. Putting the mental image to work, planners then talk glowingly of a gross world production that is greater than the sum of the national outputs. Therefore, there are benefits for everyone that remain to be divided, although this is never spelled out.