The Reagan Non-Revolution, or The Limited Choices of the US
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Auteurs : Immanuel WallersteinSource :
- Millennium [ 0305-8298 ] ; 1987-12.
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DOI: 10.1177/03058298870160030401
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<meta-value>467 The Reagan Non-Revolution, or The Limited Choices of the US SAGE Publications, Inc.1987DOI: 10.1177/03058298870160030401 ImmanuelWallerstein Fernand Braudel Center for the study of Economies, Historical Systems, and Civilizations at the State University of New York, Binghampton, NY 12901 At the end of the Second World War, the United States was the strongest economic centre of the world-economy. It alone had emerged from the war with a very advanced and efficient industrial network that had been unscarred by wartime destruction. The productivity of its agriculture was very high. It had in place by far the best, in some ways the only significant, set of institutions for research and development. Its major rival of 30. if not 80, years-Germany- was in ruins. Its political allies (but economic rivals) in Western Europe were in almost as bad a shape. Japan seemed to have been set back severely in its drive to industrial strength. As for the USSR, it seemed literally exhausted economically by its wartime efforts and sacrifices. The moment of US hegemony in the world-system had clearly arrived. But hegemony requires more than the economic underpinnings - the ability to outproduce and outsell major rivals in their home settings. It requires also a set of primarily political structures to lock economic advantage into place and make it function smoothly. The US needed to establish such institutions to handle the four principal geographic arenas of the world, as seen from a Washington perspective after 1945: the other major industrial countries; the USSR and its zone of influence; what would come to be called the Third World; and not least the US itself. In hindsight, it is easy to see what the problem was in each arena and how it was handled by the successive US governments. The immediate problem about the other major industrial countries is that they had suffered too much destruction during the war, and were too poor in current production to serve as significant markets for US peacetime exports. The US could produce what they needed cheaply enough, and needed them as customers if it was not to relapse into the Depression's underconsumption pattern. Europe (and Japan) were eager to buy. But they had no dollars. Ergo, the Marshall Plan, and related programmes of 'reconstruction'. In addition, the US faced only one opponent of significance in the warld-system, and that not in the economic arena. The USSR, while weak economically, was strong militarily, politically, and ideologically. The US needed to 'shore up' Western Europe, particularly since France and Italy, at least, had powerful Communist parties. Ergo, NATO and related programmes of alliance-building. 468 Both the economic and political programmes were successful in that by the early 1950s the US was the clear leader of a political-military bloc of major industrial nations who were recovering their economic vitality. The problem in the second arena was how to 'handle' the USSR. There were three alternatives available: permit Soviet influence and/or 'Communism' to spread; go to war to destroy the USSR; do something in-between. It is quite apparent today that the US did neither of the first two. But what was the 'something in-between'? The two code words often used to describe it, and not incorrectly, are `Yalta' and 'containment'. On the one hand, Yalta represented symbolically what its detractors have charged, a 'division of the world'. When Winston Churchill declared in Fulton, Missouri in 1946 that there was an 'iron curtain' from Stettin to Trieste, he was actually giving the final legitimation to a clear demarcation line in Europe between the 'Communist world' and the 'free world' (or in other language between the 'socialist camp' and the 'capitalist camp'). Since that time, in Europe, the relation between the two camps has been one of tension, separation, and mutual abstention from military interference in each other's zone. The West came to call this 'containment', and that it was. But it is important to note that 'containment' was not, was never, 'roll-back'. In other words, there has been an implicit, and unviolated, agreement to maintain the political status quo in Europe despite the many moments of turbulence that could have reopened the question (from the Berlin airlift and the Tito-Stalin break to the suppression of Solidarity). The third arena was the Third World. It was not yet called that in 1945 for the very simple reason that it was not yet taken seriously enough politically. What the US saw were vast geographic zones with sectors of considerable strategic importance and of considerable mineral wealth, but zones for the most part too poor to be much of an immediate market for export goods. It worried, however, that these zones were politically volatile and hence subject to the 'spread' of Communism. Indeed, after the so-called `fall' of China in 1949 with the proclamation of the Chinese People's Republic, the US began to fear a rapid diffusion of what it clearly thought of as a sort of contagion. Thus was born the famous 'dominoes' analogy. The US evolved a three-part formula to deal with this arena. It consisted of one dose of concessions to the natives (favouring 'decolonisation' or 'popular regimes', providing they were 'moderate'), one dose of the iron fist (intermittent military or covert operations when necessary, f..?.. Guatemala in 1948, Iran in 1952, Lebanon in 1956), and one dose of rhetoric masking largely benign (economic) neglect (Truman's 'Point Four' programme, Kennedy's 'Alliance for Progress'). But none of this would have worked, had the US government not been able to contain internal US social conflict. It must be remembered that the 1930s was a period of very acute domestic strife in the US, and that on two fronts. There was class conflict between labour and capital, which centred around the attempt to create union structures in the major industries. The CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations) was organising workers in the automobile, steel, electricity, and chemical sectors, plus the major extractive industries. In 1936, Walter Reuther was still getting his head battered in the wake of a famous sitdown strike. 469 The second arena of internal US conflict was primarily among the middle classes (indeed some would argue, among different segments of big capital). It was over whether the US should continue to look inward economically (and hence politically and militarily) or should orient its economy to world trade. This was the famous isolationist-interventionist debate which was passionate, bitter and prolonged. It was of course the reason why the US was the last major power to enter the Second World War. In 1945, many commentators expected both struggles (which had been largely put aside by considerations of wartime unity) to resume, and in full force. And indeed, there were signs that they would. It was the isolationist-interventionist struggle that was buried first. One of the political leaders of the isolationist camp, Senator Arthur Vandenberg, 'capitulated'. His call for a 'bipartisan foreign policy', one based on the US 'assuming its responsibilities' in the world, was quickly embraced by Roosevelt and Truman. The concept that politics should 'stop at the water's edge' has been a basic pillar of the mainstream consensus of US politics ever since. The US was now committed to an activist role in world politics, one in which it had a position on everything everywhere, and was ready to support this position politically, economically, and militarily. The class struggle was a little more difficult to contain. In 1947 the workers at General Motors went on a lengthy strike which seemed to revive the spirit of 1936. The strike, however, was finally settled by an accord based on a significant wage and benefits increase for the workers against the following counterparts: increased productivity, a no-strike pledge during the contract, and the right of management to raise prices (which affected US non-unionised and foreign workers more than US unionised ones). This formula came to be standard for all the major industries. The deal also presumed the purge of Communists and 'leftists' from the union structures. The result was relative labour peace and a rising standard of real income for US unionised workers for the next 25 years. There was one last arena of social conflict in the US, its most perennial: Black oppression. Blacks had gotten very little out of the Second World War. But they had become far more urbanised in the twentieth century and seemed ready to organise seriously. This was headed off for a while by a series of major 'concessions'. In 1947, President Truman integrated the armed forces (still segregated, even during the war) and began to use the federal system to move against 'discrimination'. In 1954, the Supreme Court made its historic ruling in Brown vs. Board of Education, declaring segregation unconstitutional. The basic legal battle had now been won. Thus it was that, in the new era of hegemony, the US could face the world as its dominant force with a united front at home: East Coast and Middle West. Labour and Capital, Black and White. Or more or less. This institutionalisation of US hegemony worked marvellously well in the 1950s, the Eisenhower days. The world economy was steadily expanding and the US was economically flourishing. The standard of living of almost all strata was rising. Internal dissent was first crushed, then co-opted out of existence. On the world scene, the US construction of its alliance network and its containment of the USSR was translated into the very visible automatic majority on everything in the United Nations. There was to be sure a nasty war in Korea, but it was a draw and could be seen as the last part of the phase of constructing the hegemonic institutions, not really a 470 challenge to them. Decolonisation had gotten off to a splendid start in the British, Dutch, and US empires, the British being the largest and most important, and to a somewhat weaker start in the French. Generally speaking, despite Bandung, US 'benign neglect' of the Third World seemed to be working. Nonetheless, by the 1960s, cracks began to appear in the by now well-oiled structures. Between European recovery in general and the German 'miracle' in particular on the one hand and Japan's striking development on the other hand, the major allies of the US were suddenly transformed from junior partners and beneficiaries to potential, even actual, competitors. The death of Stalin in 1953 turned out quickly to mark the end of an era of Soviet 'monolithism'. Within a very short time there was the beginning of 'de-stalinisation' in the USSR and 'de-satellitisation' in the socialist bloc. Kruschchev's 'secret report' to the Twentieth Party Congress was speedily diffused to the entire world, courtesy of the CIA, but it is not entirely clear that these developments worked entirely in US favour. The true 'cold war' period, roughly 1946-55, was a period of enormous political stability and ideological rigidity. Now there was to be less of each, and political maneuvering required a great deal more subtlety and sophistication. Enter the era of Kennedy. The Third World furthermore was getting out of hand. With the admission of a large number of Third World countries to the UN, the automatic US majority disappeared. By the end of the 1960s it had become virtually an automatic US minority. True, it was only a matter of toothless resolutions, but it began to be annoying, even vitiating for the US. The Cuba of the nationalist victory of the 26th of July Movement came to be transformed into the Cuba that inspired socialist revolutions everywhere in the Americas. True, US ineptitude played a large part in this further turn of the screw, but suddenly 'subversion' seemed to bp. located in the US 'backyard'. And in Asia, the Indochina 'arrangement' of 1955 came very unstuck and President Johnson escalated the US into full-scale involvement in a second and far less winnable Asian land war. Finally, at home, the US moved from confrontation with the Black Power and the women's movements to the institution of 'affirmative action'. Instead of denouncing counterculture, the Establishment tried to co-opt its practitioners via the acceptance of new dress codes and liberalised sex and drug mores precisely among the future elites - the young upwardly mobile professionals - or yuppies. The 1970s, with Nixon chased from office and the Church committee exposing the CIA, seemed a far cry from McCarthyite anti-Communist hysteria or even the self-assured liberal interventionism of the Kennedy days. All these changes of the 1970s were no doubt the result of a transformed geopolitics and a shaky world-economy. My point, however, is that the US government tried to respond by effecting some reduction in its arrogance quotient, playing for time, reducing immediate change. It was as though the leaders believed that, even if the US was declining in the long run, the long run could be a very long time. And meanwhile US life, even if somewhat troubling, did not have to be that bad. Needless to say, this is the kind of policy that can only work with a great deal of patience. And a weakening economy was not well-suited to maximise patience. Rather it rendered more acute internal tensions. Hence, when the Ayatollah Khomeini decided to take over the US embassy and hold hostages for a whole year, 471 he quickly strained US popular patience. Unable to overthrow Khomeini, the US voters overthrew Carter and elected Ronald Reagan. Reagan's appeal, and the basis of his subsequent political strength, was in his denunciation of the entire Nixon-Ford-Carter stance of 'adjustment to new world realities' and the recognition of the 'limitations' of US power. Reagan argued that the problem lay not in objective world reality but in the subjective response to it of US leadership during the 1970s. Reagan argued that if the US were tough (again), the world would respect the US (again). He wanted to be tough with the USSR, tough with our allies, tough with the Third World, and tough with all the liberals, deviants, and delinquents in the US itself. Or so he said. That is to say, Reagan's rhetoric was machismo down the line. But what was his practice? Therein lies a tale, as any US 'conservative' can attest. Once again, let us review the US government actually did in its four arenas: the West, the East, the South, and at home. The Reagan administration tried 'toughness' on two major economic issues with its Western European allies. In the early 1980s it tried to prevent them from entering into an agreement with the USSR to build a gas pipeline across Europe. The US argument was military and ideological. The response of its allies, even faithful and Tory Mrs. Thatcher, was that the issue was strictly economic. Later on, a similar debate occurred over the building of a West European airbus. In both cases, the US was totally incapable of disssuading Western Europe from pursuing its direct economic interests. The same had quite clearly been the case with Japan in the interminable trade talks of the two countries. In this arena, Mr. Reagan has been a paper tiger. The Reagan administration has certainly played it tough with the 'evil empire'. It has spent incredible and unprecedented amounts of money on the military. But what has it thereby accomplished militarily, or politically, that is different in any important way from what was the status quo ante? Has the USSR changed its geopolitical stance on any major issue. Is it politically less powerful in the world-system? Unless Mr. Reagan wishes to take immediate credit for the political emergence of Gorbachev, it is hard to see what he can use to demonstrate that machismo has made a difference. In the Third World to be sure Reagan can show some startling achievements: the US military unseated the government of Grenada, where a politically unfriendly regime commanded the resources of a population of just over 100,000 people. The US has also managed to bomb Libya - once! What the US manifestly has not been able to do is to keep marines in Beirut, intimidate Khomeini, or overthrow the Sandiaistas in Nicaragua. The last is the most interesting non-action, since it has clearly been extremely high on the Reagan agenda, and would have been the clear evidence of 'success' in this arena. If Reagan has not been able to invade Nicaragua, the reason seems clear enough. The US public seems ready to tolerate maximally the loss of a handful of lives in an action that is over in three days (Grenada), but not the loss of 200 lives in a situation of indefinite further loss (Beirut), and surely not the prospective loss of tens of thousands of lives in a far-olI' warfare zone (Nicaragua). Call it the Vietnam syndrome, or what you will, but the fact is that it has become a political reality so clear that even Reagan has not dared go against it directly. This is the simplest explanation of the inefficacious convolutions of the Iran-Contra fiasco. 472 Well, then, surely at home Reagan has made a difference. He has tried to intimidate the Democrats by a distorted reading of the 'bipartisan' foreign policy. While the Democrats in Congress win few medals for bravery in their foreign policy disputes with Reagan, the fact is that they have dragged their feet on more issues than at any previous time. One cannot say intimidation has more than slowed down the rate of Democratic defection from their previous automatic cold war reflexes. Mr. Reagan has broken the labour-capital arrangements in a big way, both by busting unions (PATCO, during the air traffic controllers strike) and by leaning on the real wage income of the unionised working class (tax cut redistribution to the wealthy). He has no doubt made the poor poorer. But a revolution in the system established by the New Deal? Scarcely. Everything is in place to rebound, when labour gets ready to be militant again, which should be soon. Mr. Reagan has also sought to break the 'affirmative action'-style thrusts of the 1970s. He certainly has been unfriendly in every possible way, and neither minorities nor women will think of the Reagan years as a moment of advance. But how far have they been pushed back politically? An honest response would be: a lot less than they feared. As for the so-called 'social agenda' - issues like abortion, prayer, pornography - one only has to listen to the current screams of right-wing groups devoted to these issues to realise that they are screams about Reagan's betrayal (that is, inefficacy) on these issues. The lesson of the Reagan era is that rnachismo as a response to US decline is certainly not more, and probably a lot less, effective than the Nixon-Ford-Carter 'realist' approach. Objective reality sets limits on policy-makers. One can defer negatives, minimise losses, manoeuver to retain some (if less) advantage, but one cannot command the waves to halt.</meta-value>
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